


Clothes Maketh the Man

by PunJedi



Category: Pacific Rim (Movies)
Genre: Angst, Angst with a Happy Ending, Canon Compliant, Character Study, Fix-It, Gen, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Mako Mori Lives, Possession, Post-Movie: Pacific Rim: Uprising (2018), Recovery
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-12
Updated: 2020-07-12
Packaged: 2021-03-05 01:47:32
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 26,848
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25226299
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PunJedi/pseuds/PunJedi
Summary: When Dr. Newton Geiszler got dressed the morning after, he put on a suit.Meet the new Newt,he thought.Stressed, possessed, and wellfuckingdressed.Essentially, an exploration of the many cries for help Newt made that went unanswered, and then the aftermath. (Which is softer and gayer than it would probably realistically be, but Uprising was angsty enough.)
Relationships: Newton Geiszler & Hermann Gottlieb, Newton Geiszler & Mako Mori, Newton Geiszler/Hermann Gottlieb
Comments: 15
Kudos: 87
Collections: PACIFIC RIM





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> So like, Uprising, huh. (I say this like I'm not 2 years late to the party.)  
> This fic starts when Newt first gets possessed, covers the events of Uprising (though like, briefly, because there's no need to rehash the whole movie), and then goes post-canon with a focus on Newt's recovery. (Fair warning, if you're looking for a dark, gritty recovery arc that really dives deep into Newt's trauma, this is Not It. I don't claim everything is sunshine and rainbows afterwards, but I also think he deserves to hug the man he's in love with and just breathe for awhile.)  
> Pretty much canon compliant except for Mako's death, because fuck that noise.  
> 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW for brief usage of addiction/drug metaphors (but like, seriously brief and not much expounded upon, because I jump metaphors like a struggling tv show jumps sharks)

When Dr. Newton Geiszler got dressed the morning after, he put on a suit.

He’d bought it way back, actually, for some overinflated ceremony that some genius in the upper echelons of the PPDC thought might alleviate the stress of the end of the world. Normally he would’ve shown up to the ceremony—to _any_ ceremony, he could’ve been getting married and it wouldn’t have mattered—in his usual attire, because suits sucked and if they wanted Newton Geiszler, they were going to _get_ Newton Geiszler. In the tattooed flesh, in the shitty guts-stained button-up. But, well… he’d been thinking, brainstorming the next step in his mind-bogglingly brilliant plan to make Hermann fall in love with him, and yeah maybe he’d been kinda drunk, and yeah maybe he hadn’t slept in three days straight, and yeah maybe he shouldn’t have been trusted with Wi-Fi access and a credit card, like, ever in his life. But there he’d been.

Anyway, he’d bought the suit. He’d never worn it, though, because Taurax had ripped through the Philippines the night of the ceremony, and he’d been far too busy wrangling with the short-sighted militaristic dicks that wouldn’t lend him a helicopter to even entertain the idea of a Hermann Gottlieb that would give two shits about how Newt looked in a suit.

How did Newt look in a suit? Fucking uncomfortable. Too tight around the middle and too short in some places and too long in others and it covered up his tattoos, washing painstakingly-painted oranges and blues and greens over with black. He itched to roll up the sleeves, craved it like a junkie desperate for a hit, vibrating out of the skin that was no longer his. He wanted to loosen the collar. He wanted to fidget with the cuffs. He wanted to tear the damn thing off before he suffocated.

He wanted to do anything but what he did next, which was to dig up his old contact lenses that were probably shot to shit and pop them in. Didn’t even spare a glance at his thick-rimmed glasses as he discarded them on the countertop.

 _Meet the new Newt,_ he thought, wildly, desperately, and normally if his mind was a whirlwind now it was a firestorm, eating itself alive, incinerating the last dregs of his energy, ash chasing down the burning lines of his thoughts.

 _Meet the new Newt,_ he thought again, or thought the first time, or the fourth or the fifth. _Stressed, possessed, and well_ fucking _dressed._

He had seconds, less than, before they crushed him, obliterated the last faltering links between his consciousness and his body. It was a new incursion, brutal and immediate, leaving Newt just enough time for one desperate, last-ditch plan. (But weren’t those his favorite sort? Fortune favored the brave—he could only hope it likewise favored the unpardonably _stupid._ )

Newt had seconds. Newt let _loose._

He blathered and blithered and blustered and _burned_ , so hot that it hid the last spark of rebellion in his mind, so brightly that it obscured the last flicker of hope. Not for long; but for long _enough_. Every spare neuron in his brain lit up, and for a brief second, it blinded them. Newt was a mouthy bastard.

 ** _E N O U G H_** the things in his head, the things in his mind in his brain in his skull in his skin in _him in Newt_ snarled. **_S H U T U P_**

But Newton Geiszler hadn’t shut up in 35 fucking years of life, he hadn’t shut up when it was pin-headed assholes and he hadn’t shut up when it was narrow-minded soldiers and he hadn’t shut up when it was his best friend and his worst enemy and the love of his life. He sure wasn’t going to shut up now. He kept thinking and rambling and bombarding the _things in his fucking head_ with images and skeins of thought and _damn I look hot right now, damn we look sexy, I love this on us, let’s ditch the glasses hide the tats slick back the hair let’s GO WILD I was holding myself back before but now we’re free baby, we’re free Alice, we’re finally fucking free—_

 ** _S O O N_** they growled, savage hunger in double tones. A horrible dissonant anticipation rang up his spine and sent a sick thrill to the pleasure centers of his brain, neurotransmitter-induced excitement clashing against snatches of grotesque, neon nightmares. Cities made graveyards. The Earth in flames. A world that had no time for rigor mortis, where bodies were crushed and feasted upon raw. **_S O O N W E W I L L B E F R E E_**

Newt pretended that he wasn’t dying, pretended that he wasn’t the sickest he’d ever felt. The calm smug face in the mirror even looked it. _We’re free_ now _sweetheart we have the world at our fingertips let’s go out there let’s fuckin rock this let’s burn the fuckin world down—_

They roared, impatient, and they swallowed him up.

He was drowning, choking, shriveling, gone. But he didn’t stop talking. And his body wore the suit.

It looked in the mirror.

**_W H Y N O T_ **

* * *

Here’s why the suit: Newt wasn’t strong enough.

He knew he wasn’t strong enough. He was the smartest person in any room (except for his lab for his harbor for his home of ten years), his mental muscles could out-flex the physical of any hotshot jaeger pilot, and he wasn’t anywhere near strong enough for this fight. There were too many of them. They were _everywhere._ Newt had succumbed immediately; quicker than immediately.

They had a plan to use him. Which was a problem, because he _hated_ being used. And if _he_ couldn’t stop himself, well… that left someone external.

Hence the suit. Dr. Newton Geiszler of the six PhDs, part-time savior of the world, criminally misunderstood Kaiju fanatic and genius biologist, did not wear suits. He did not wear contact lenses, or silk shirts, or any hairstyle that required any amount of time spent on it. He simply did not.

But now he did.

And someone would notice. Someone had to notice. People didn’t undergo 180 degree personality switches overnight. And, yeah, maybe _they_ had been unexpectedly busy—he’d lost consciousness after Drifting with Alice and woken up to his voice accepting some tech firm job offer and his body booking an early morning flight practically out of the country—but _someone had to notice._

Nobody noticed. It was ass o’clock in the morning, and the only people around were either so sick on jetlag that they wouldn’t have noticed a Kaiju strolling through the terminal or they were the uptight business types that _might’ve_ noticed a Kaiju strolling through the terminal, but wouldn’t have hung up the phone over it.

As it was, a Kaiju strolled through the terminal wearing Newt’s body and no one noticed it.

He got on the plane, and no one noticed. He touched down near Shao Industries HQ, and no one noticed. He flirted with the receptionist at the fancy-pants hotel he checked into, and no one noticed. (Not even the receptionist, really, which kinda hurt, because he was a catch.) He ordered some insanely-priced lobster dish from room service, acting like the rich assholes he’d always despised, and no one fucking noticed.

He’d slipped out of the base right under everyone’s noses, right under _Hermann’s_ stupid chronically-upturned nose ( _he should really get that checked on can’t be healthy to walk around with that stick up his ass all the time might be a medical miracle Hermann Hermann Hermann_ ), and no one had noticed.

Apparently saving the world from himself was going to be trickier than expected.

* * *

He called Hermann. Had to. The things controlling him (they didn’t get names, they didn’t get the dignity of a fucking name, they got expletives and they got ‘things’ and he spared not a whit of his great scintillating genius on alien colonizer nomenclature), they were smart. Smarter maybe even than him, smart enough to know that they had to _be Newt Geiszler_ and Hermann Gottlieb could not be removed from that. At least, not immediately, not without permanent damage.

As Newt figured, back in his dark sucking oubliette of a brain-space, if he cut all ties with Hermann this instant, never talked to him again, never called him, never texted, just—disappeared off the face of the planet, Hermann would track him down. He would be worried (though he wouldn’t admit it), he would be spitting mad, he would be utterly immovable in his quest to find whatever corner of the globe Newt had bunked off to. Most importantly, Hermann would be suspicious once he’d found him.

If Newt had his choice, he’d follow that course—make Hermann as suspicious as possible, as wary, as on-guard as he could. But kinda the whole point of possession was that Newt _didn’t_ have his choice.

So the bitches in his skull called Hermann.

Hermann picked up immediately. Newt was kinda flattered, but he wasn’t the one in control when he drawled out a pleased, “Hermann!”

“Newton!” Hermann exclaimed in reply, and Newt had a second to be overwhelmed by a new force, to drown in another kind of all-consumption—bone-deep, seared-into-his-sulci relief. Then Hermann growled, “Where the bloody hell are you, you irresponsible fool? Your disgusting Kaiju specimens are rotting and polluting _our_ shared workspace, did none of your six doctorates teach you basic lab safety?”

And Newt, Newt must be some kind of masochist or something, because he kind of loved Hermann for that, too.

For all that he wanted to listen to Hermann bitch at him until the world tore itself to shreds around them—though, he’d also take Hermann saying nice things, nice unexpected things like _I’ll go with you_ and _by jove,_ _we are going to own this thing for sure_ and _do this together,_ together—he kind of needed to _stop_ the world from, y’know, tearing itself to shreds.

Or rather, he needed to stop _himself_ from tearing it to shreds, because that was a distinct and disturbing possibility.

His best bet? Hermann deciding he needed to be examined by a team of expert psychologists, preferably under heavy guard. Not that Newt was much of a physical threat, but if he got his hands on some tech, he sure as shit would be. Especially with his own knowledge augmented by what the Godzilla-wannabes in his head knew; he could _easily_ bring the whole damn PPDC to its knees, and _fuck that shouldn’t sound so appealing though yeah some of those rangers were dicks to me and Hermann but no no that doesn’t justify—_

He was getting ahead of himself. First he had to freak Hermann out. Luckily, it was a talent.

(It was worrying, worrying that they were letting him guide this conversation, even mildly. If he’d tried to tell Hermann the truth, he had no doubt they’d gag him before he could even stretch his vocal cords, but here they were ceding to his dubious expertise. _Why?_ )

“Of course, Herms,” he replied, pouring every ounce of sincerity he possibly could into the words, so much so that it accidentally turned into sarcasm. Whatever, Hermann had that effect on him. “Like, usually I’d absolutely come fix that, but I won’t be going back to the lab any time soon. Any time at all, actually.”

The line was silent, conspicuously, obviously so. Then Hermann said, faintly, “Newton? Are you…” Another pause, followed by, “Never mind. What do you mean, you won’t be returning to the lab?”

“I got a new gig, buddy!” he exclaimed. “Ever heard of Shao Industries? ‘Course you have, they’re the leading technological company in the world. They’ve got a _fantastic_ biotech division, God, you should see it—all focused on the Drift, of course. Who better than me to help run it?”

“A man who possesses an inch of humility, maybe,” Hermann replied tightly. “One that wouldn’t run off in the middle of the night to the private sector without so much as leaving a note behind for his lab partner.”

Here, Newt was faced with two options: apologize, completely and genuinely, because he was so so sorry he could burst with it; or double down, twist the knife in further, and pray that Hermann would notice that “fucking off and becoming a capitalist” was extremely out of character for him.

The second one was pretty much the only hope humanity had left, so.

But it was dawning on him, with each brush of his stifled consciousness against their roiling desire for doomsday, that the reason they had allowed him agency thus far was that their two opposite goals converged at this single point. Namely: unnerving Hermann Gottlieb.

 _They_ wanted Hermann gone, out of Newt’s life forever. Whatever the specifics of their plan, whatever they needed Newt so badly for, it did not involve Hermann—in fact, seemed to specifically involve Hermann’s abject absence.

 _He_ wanted Hermann alert and wary, suspicious of Newt’s distinctly and shockingly uncharacteristic behavior. His plan had few specifics, but the major one was: get Hermann to _notice._ And normally, his plan would be a smudge on the walls of his skull, obliterated in the wake of their arrival, but… his ulterior motives aligned with their ultimate scheme. They allowed him to alter himself—his personality, his behavior, his sense of style—and thus to be altered in turn.

(Maybe more than they thought they had. But that was for Newt to know and for them to never find out, or at least, to only find out when Newt was safely locked up and no threat to the world at large.)

(He hoped. Oh, God, did he hope.)

“Ha, Hermann, you got me,” he laughed. “Humble isn’t really my deal, is it? And sorry ‘bout the whole running out on you thing, it was all a little last-minute. Didn’t think you’d care that much, honestly!”

If Newton had thought he’d seen Hermann cold before, he was positively arctic now. “ _I_ didn’t think you would make such a large decision without telling me, but here we are.”

 _I’d never ditch you, buddy, you know that. You have to know that._ And damn it was exhausting trying to conceal anything real and important and _his_ from _them_ , exhausting and fruitless, because they knew everything.

 ** _G I V E U P_** they thundered even as Newt’s voice said, “Aww, c’mon, Herms, don’t be like that. It’s not like we’ll never see each other again!” He paused, smiled a touch even though Hermann couldn’t see him. “Besides, we saved the motherfucking planet! You can’t have thought that—what—we were gonna stay in that shitty little lab forever? We’re rockstars now!”

When Hermann spoke again, he seemed to falter. “Rockstars,” he repeated, sounding faintly lost. And then, stronger, “You could have at least mentioned that you were looking at other options.”

“Last-minute, remember? I hardly knew I _was_ looking for other options before Shao contacted me.”

“Still,” Hermann said, painfully earnest, “maybe we could have… worked something out.”

God, if that wasn’t a punch to the throat. Would haves, could haves, what ifs—Newt wanted what they tempted so badly he could hardly breathe, but. But. That was the whole nature of the wishing game, wasn’t it? Futile regret and grief for an unborn future.

He had to keep moving. He had to keep screaming for help in the only way he knew how.

(But mother of Kaiju, it hurt.)

“Look, Hermann, I gotta scram. Got an important meeting in, like, three minutes. You know how it is—or, well, I guess you don’t.” He laughed a little, a false, short sound, and it tasted so wrong in Newt’s mouth he wanted to vomit. He wasn’t sure if it was him or them speaking. “’S not like the PPDC ever really gave two shits about us, right? No fancy formal meetings, no flashy tech. It really is great over here! I’ve got this massive lab, all to myself, don’t have to share with anybody. You’d love it.”

Hermann responded with a clipped, “I’m sure,” and Newt could _hear_ him closing off, shutting down, frosting over. Maybe normally Newt wasn’t the most observant person when it came to a little thing called Other People’s Emotions but stuck as a spectator to his own conversations, he felt so painfully aware of the divide he was carving that he could _sob._

It was both him and them responsible for this, a new yellow line painted across their metaphorical laboratory that would only deepen into a breach, a smoldering awful Breach, with time. Newt was trying to tip Hermann off, the one person who might notice something wrong; _they_ were trying to chase Hermann away, the one person who might ruin their plan.

Hermann was closing off; _they_ were winning.

And Newt was screaming, banging at the bars of his mind, scratching at the walls of his skull, begging Hermann, pleading with Hermann, _Hermann c’mon man dude buddy please I don’t_ really _sound this annoying normally do I, Hermann you’ve known me for ten fucking years, Hermann don’t you dare leave me alone Hermann Hermann Hermann HermannHermannHermannHermann—_

Hermann cleared his throat. “Yes. Well. I suppose I shall be hearing from you later, then?” He said it like he doubted it, sharp and caustic and maybe even _hurting_ , and Newt—Newt—

Newt said, “Yeah, great talking to you,” and hung up the phone.

 ** _G I V E U P_** they said again, and they were _grinning_ , delighting in the conflagration of his hopes. **_G I V E U P L I K E H E D I D_**

Newt sank down, down.

* * *

Liwen Shao, his fancy new employer, didn’t like him.

That was fair. He didn’t like himself either. New-And-Improved Newt was a massive dick.

Unfortunately, she hadn’t known the _real_ him, other than as one of the erstwhile saviors of the world, and as Chuck Hansen had proven, you _could_ be a huge asshole and still save humanity. Thanks, Chuck. (Look, he respected the guy’s monumental sacrifice, but he didn’t exactly miss the jerk who would sometimes wander into the lab piss-drunk and pissed-off, shoving him and Hermann around like a schoolyard bully working through his daddy issues.)

The things in his head reared at that name, remembered a blast and heat and light seen through another’s eyes, nuclear devastation. Chuck had set them back, set them back _far_ , and Newt grinned in nasty satisfaction. Thought a little more genuinely: Thanks, Chuck.

They hissed at him—he cost the war he cost the Breach he cost many many many soldiers—but Newt just spat back, rambling spitfire:

 _Yeah that’s right he killed your guys, and you didn’t even manage to get him back, he chose it himself, he chose to give his life, you couldn’t kill him but oh he got you—he vaporized your soldiers, up in smoke, atoms rent apart, do you know what that’s like, do you know what it’s like to hurt? You’re above it all, the distant masterminds, you don’t know the madness of pain—here, would you like to_ feel _it? Because I’m just human and I’ve lived with the reality of pain every day of my goddamn life, it’s a needle buzzing against your bones, it’s crouching panicked in a corner as your lungs and brain betray you, it’s the metal pins holding your hip together grinding and grating and keeping you awake—_

 _I know intimately how the human body works and I know how_ yours _works better than anyone else on the planet and I know how dying feels, like a cascade failure of all your systems, first you’re bleeding out gushing acidic blue and then you’re slowing, slowing, failing, and the brain is panicking, there is adrenaline in the bloodstream but where is the bloodstream, your heart is failing, all of your hearts are failing, there is not enough blood to sustain it, we can lose 2 liters I never figured out how much you could lose but I bet it’s not_ that _much before you start to_ collapse, _or you could go like Chuck, your cells being ripped apart instantaneously, just there and gone, blink and brain death, body evaporated into cerulean mist, and now you’re in me and I’m so fucking breakable compared to_ you, _I wonder what could happen to_ me—

 ** _S T O P_** they snarled, and walked his body face-first into a wall.

That actually was somewhat in character for him, the _real_ him, because he would get distracted walking with Hermann arguing about whatever basic scientific axiom they couldn’t agree on that week, but Liwen Shao wouldn’t know. She just looked at him like he was an insufferable moron (and how come when Hermann looked at him like that it seemed so much _fonder_ ) and continued her explanation of his new responsibilities.

He’d completely tuned out the entire spiel, but since none of those new responsibilities were _his_ so much as they were _theirs_ , he couldn’t really give a damn. If they wanted him fired, they’d screw up and get him fired; otherwise he had a feeling he’d be hanging onto this position for a very long time.

His new position. Even past the averted apocalypse he’d worked with the PPDC, analyzing every last Kaiju cell that he could while there were still preserved samples, and when he’d squeezed every bit of knowledge possible from there, he’d turned to writing papers and organizing the vast amount of data he’d compiled. Although the science department had been flooded with funding and prospective researchers—almost entirely dedicated to the noble pursuit of How To Avoid This Ever Happening Again Ever—neither Newt nor Hermann had ever requested a separate lab. They’d just… settled into their old space, their old habits, and it had been comfortable without the debilitating weight of the world on their shoulders. Hermann tripped Newt with his cane and Newt crept over to Hermann’s chalkboard and crossed some negative signs into positive, and it was so easy and safe and familiar that Newt hadn’t ever wanted to leave it behind. He’d known it couldn’t last forever, of course; not even the Kaiju incursion had, and that had seemed immutable.

…but he’d kinda thought, off-hand, that maybe he could convince Hermann to go on a lecture tour with him, just the two of them and their adoring fans (perhaps “adoring fans” was a little strong for a bunch of university students but he could still get it, okay, and Hermann was shockingly attractive because or in spite of his vintage professor look). And maybe Newt would rediscover the bravery—or the sheer stupidity as Hermann termed it—he’d used to Drift with the Kaiju hivemind, and confess his undying devotion in a way that sounded a little less pathetic than that but genuine nonetheless, because Hermann, closet romantic, went in for that shit.

Now look at him. Instead of travelling the world, wowing the scientific community with his massive intellect and Hermann with his sexual prowess (and also his massive intellect, ideally), he was a glorified marionette, a prophet in a religion of one.

It was lonely as hell, being the herald of a ravenous alien race.

It was almost hard to remember, hard to comprehend, but Hermann had liked him. He’d pretended he didn’t but that couldn’t fool Newt, he’d literally been in his head. Liwen Shao didn’t like him, and neither did the things in his brain.

* * *

“I finally moved in with Alice the other day—”

“ _Alice?_ ” Hermann sputtered, had what sounded to be a coughing fit, and then spat out, “I have to go. Goodbye.”

Newt kind of wanted to laugh, but then there were glowing tendrils like Otachi’s tongue curling all around him, sinking into him, pulling him back into the black.

* * *

His Mandarin was crap.

That was on purpose. Whenever the shits in his brain tried to learn it, he distracted them by jabbering in a mash of English and German, by creating false connections, by cross-wiring the encoding of words until his grasp on the language could never hope to be better than the average apathetic high schooler’s.

There was no really good reason for doing this, because Newt being unable to pick up Mandarin wasn’t exactly the massive tip-off he needed to convince people he was quite literally possessed, but it pissed off the things possessing him. It also pissed off Liwen, but she just took it out on his increasingly distant body, so it was a win-win.

Despite the fact that he could hardly speak the language, despite the fact that Liwen couldn’t stand him, it was an objectively _nice_ gig. The labs were top of the line, his staff was composed of the brightest technological minds money could hire, the location was great, the pay was better, and the food was so much improved from the slop in the PPDC mess that Newt wanted to press charges for the twelve wasted years where he could’ve been eating like this instead. It was, put simply, the sort of job that a genius who’d saved the world _deserved._

Newt irrationally hated it. He absolutely fucking hated it.

It was too neat, too nice, too tidy, too sleek. His apartment echoed, empty, cavernous after living practically out of a closet for ten years, and don’t even get him _started_ on the _labs_ , the _world-class_ fucking _labs_ that he _hated._ He had a whole cohort of science minions and somehow also had an entire hulking laboratory to himself, like, who approved that? It was a frankly egregious waste of resources, in Newt’s esteemed opinion, but maybe he was just acclimatized to not being able to requisition so much as a coffee mug in the middle of a war with an alien race.

It was just too _much._ Everything was too much nowadays.

The presences in his head were too much, far too much, all-consuming and _everywhere._ He felt like he was drowning in his empty empty streamlined lab, felt like he was being swallowed up by the white-coated horde who called him “Dr. Geiszler.” His body bought all sorts of shit using his ridiculous new paycheck to fill up his gaping apartment, and it was the sort of garish rich-people garbage he’d always despised, but it kept the place from devouring him without a trace.

He’d loved the Kaiju because they were empirical evidence of how huge the universe was, how awesomely enormous, blue-blooded proof that Newt could work and work and work and never run out of things to study, to learn. Now they didn’t make him feel the hugeness of the universe; now they just made him feel small. Worse than small: minuscule, microscopic.

He was trapped there, in his lab, in his mind, trapped between four gleaming white walls, trapped within the gray meat of his brain. For all the work he did there, for all the time he spent there, it never stopped feeling suffocating. It never stopped feeling _other._

There were no chalkboards in his new lab.

* * *

He was working to bring the end of the world and couldn’t stop himself.

But that didn’t mean he had to stop being an irritating little shit, and so he named their Gestalt Kaiju monstrosity, future doomsday machine and the most powerful creature the world had ever seen… Mega-Kaiju.

He got a real kick out of it, at least until they shunted him out his brain, shrieking their displeasure as they forced his body to undo the whole two seconds of work he’d spent on the name. Apparently, the fucks in his brain didn’t appreciate displays of disrespect from weakling humans.

Newt kept renaming it, though—petty, stubborn rebellion, his trademark—until they finally ceded the battle. So even though he was going to engineer a WMD that put the atom bomb to shame, at least it had a dumb fucking name.

* * *

It wasn’t that Newt didn’t talk to Hermann for a straight half-decade. But it wasn’t _not_ that either.

He really did call him. He called him when he was almost, _almost_ back in control, and Hermann’s familiar voice ringing over the line made him feel for a moment like he could take back his mind so long as Hermann never stopped talking to him. (Those calls were the worst, because he had to consciously play Newton not Newt and he fucking _hated_ Newton, and he could tell it was hurting Hermann, and he _knew_ it was hurting himself. When he ended those calls, he would double over and retch, all bile and blood, and when he stood up again wiping his mouth and nose, he wasn’t the one at the reins.)

He called Hermann when he was the furthest away from control, when it was those _things_ keeping up appearances and slowly, surely, irrevocably severing the connection between them. They were both doing the same work and yet it was only working for _them,_ not him, because apparently Hermann thought Newt could just fuck off to a shiny new job and stop caring about him, which, _rude._ And hurtful. And ultimately detrimental to the continued existence of humanity, given that Newt only had the one—abysmally failing—plan.

He called Hermann at all states of consciousness and control, so no, it wasn’t like Newt didn’t talk to Hermann for five straight goddamn years. But see—see—

Newt couldn’t tell where he ended and Newton, _New_ ton began, and he didn’t even know when his shitty alter ego started going by that pretentious fucking name, _I’m not even a physicist I’m a biologist why would I go by Newton when I could go by Newt I’m not a seventy-three year old man I’m not Hermann Gottlieb I’m not_ —

Newt anymore.

So it wasn’t his calls to Hermann that were in doubt, it was his identity when making them.

He hated the calls, whoever he was, because each one left him further and further from Hermann. He hated the calls, _so so much_ , but he couldn’t lose them, because, because—

He missed Hermann so much he couldn’t breathe. He missed him like he missed the fevered late nights that became tired early mornings where Hermann’s scowl softened with exhaustion and his own manic energy dimmed and threatened to give out on him entirely and they both paused to just breathe together. He missed him like he missed the steady strike of chalk against a blackboard, he missed him like he missed brilliant blazing arguments that sent both his mind and heart racing, because apparently heated intellectual discourse really did it for him. He missed Hermann like he missed having his own mind, and he missed him like having Hermann’s mind in his.

He was inextricably bound to the monsters in his head, and they hated Hermann as much as Newt loved him, they hated him like they were the Newt from fifteen years ago, furious beyond belief at the pretentious mathematician screaming at them, at him, _whoever._

They loathed him, utterly loathed him, because so much of Newt’s mind was howling _Hermann Hermann Hermann Hermann_ at any given moment, and they despised being tethered to a singular being, a single other mind, so inextricably. Atrophied ties from that fateful long-ago Drift still connected his mind to Hermann’s, too fragile to carry any information but undoubtedly present; sometimes they wanted to go hunt the man down and strangle him, crush him, wipe the taint of him from the Earth and their mind.

They trawled Newt’s memories, rifling through them as if through a cheap office filing cabinet, pulling out all the times he was so viscerally angry at Hermann he could’ve hit him over the head with his own fucking blackboard. Newt spent several days in an exquisite hellscape of rage and hate and his worst memories with jagged, monstrous laughter ringing in the background.

When he’d finally fought himself free from sick fantasies of bashing in the skull of his best friend—what’s worse was it was _satisfying_ it was _necessary_ it was _relishable_ and _no no no no no no nonononono_ please—he was sick on the floor of his shiny new lab, and kneeling in his bloody vomit he could only think that it finally looked like _their_ , his and Hermann’s, lab, slop and fluid sliming the floor.

When he’d finally regained a tenuous grip on his mind and _they_ had regained a stronger grip on his body, he covered up the fear and the desperation and the sheer fucking horror as best he could, and started to bombard them with—

_Hermann’s harmless oh my God he’s totally harmless why would we waste energy on him—_

_He’s got half the brain we do and none of the drive he can’t do shit against us don’t_ worry _babe—_

_What is he gonna nail us with his cane calm down baby calm down Alice we’ll avoid him that’s all—_

_We’re ending the world we don’t have time for_ Hermann Gottlieb _of all people we don’t have time for anyone it’s just you and me it’s you and me until the end of time baby—_

He was lying, blatantly lying, and he was too deeply submerged within them for them not to be intimately aware of every atom of him, every single sparking chemical sent through his neural pathways, but the thing was: they were winning, and they knew it. So what if he wouldn’t kill Hermann? It was only a matter of time. He Drifted with Alice every night and it _wasn’t_ his choice but it was _close_ to it, far closer than was comfortable. Drifting with the Kaiju hivemind was like a shot of adrenaline straight into his bloodstream, like the most incredible cerulean high.

He remembered navigating the Bone Slums all those years ago, on the eve of the end of the world, looking for Hannibal Chau before he knew he was such a crazy bastard. Some dude had tried to sell him Kaiju bone powder for one bullshit reason or another, and he had obviously declined because not only was it a) of dubious legality it was definitively b) of absolutely no scientific merit whatsoever, which Newt knew because he’d spent 48 straight hours conducting all the experiments he possibly could on the substance just so he could firmly debunk the idea, though it _had_ released some interesting chemicals when lit on fire, and—

And, and anyway, to get to the point, that guy should’ve been bottling the feeling of a Kaiju Drift, because he could’ve made serious bank off of all the crazy assholes that would’ve sold their soul to chase the high down the rabbit hole.

But the problem with a high, of course, was the crash that followed. And Newt spent most of his nights and days in the crash, lying broken in the wreckage of his ravaged mind while Alice and her friends took the liberty of keeping his body in motion.

Constant fucking motion, he didn’t think he slept most nights; Drifting took the place of proper sleep, work took the place of meals, and suddenly his stupid fucking suits were too _large_ for his skinny-verging-on-wasted frame. One day he collapsed, literally collapsed, mind blinking off like a computer shutting down before it rebooted a second later, the things in his skull howling with confusion and revulsion, screams of **_W E A K H U M A N U S E L E S S_** bringing him to his knees.

He ate more after that, took perfunctory naps, even _exercised_. God, he _exercised._ He hadn’t thought he could be more disgusted with himself, given that he was actively working on bringing about the apocalypse, but then his traitorous body went out on an early morning run and proved him wrong.

His body’s condition improved; his mind’s deteriorated.

Like sliding, sinking, drowning in the Pacific Ocean, Newt floundered and fell. It wasn’t brain death; it was just sleep, because the more days that passed where he had no control whatsoever, the less tethered his consciousness was, the less grounded he became. The Breach in his mind’s ocean boiled with golden volcanic activity, golden and electric blue, and everything else faded to the darkness of the deep sea.

 _Heh, the twilight zone,_ he thought, and slipped under.

* * *

Being the head of R&D of Shao Industries meant that he had Duties and Obligations outside of bringing about the apocalypse. Of course, being famous and brilliant and sexy as shit meant that some of those Duties and Obligations were just… parties. Schmoozing, boozing parties for rich pricks courting investment, but a party was a party.

_(It was the night the world didn’t end and the Shatterdome was alight with the force of their collective elation._

_It was a night where no distinctions were drawn between soldiers and scientists, maintenance workers and marshall—the lines in the sand had been washed away with the changing tide. A man who’d seemed immortal had fallen a hero; two brainy bickering scientists had enabled the world to be saved; nothing was as it seemed, but for their jubilation. Their losses were innumerable but there was victory in the air, in the water, in the Kaiju-blue seas._

_It wasn’t just a party, it was an outpouring of relief, their first truly free moment in years; it was a monument to all their sacrifice, wrought in joy._

_Even Hermann had gone, iris bloody but smile victorious as he gripped the neck of a beer bottle—)_

“Hey, Dr. Geiszler!”

Newton flinched, looked up. It was one of his head scientists—Newt didn’t remember their name, but the things in his head would supply it if he needed it, a tiny pocket of their infinitude devoted to keeping Newt from outing himself as a sea of Kaiju in a trenchcoat. “How are you tonight?”

“Hey, great, thanks,” he responded, nice and casual. God, he just wanted to go _(—back to the lab, pass out on the couch, wake up to a parka draped over—)_ Drift with Alice; but no, corporate bureaucracy called. “Sweet scene, right? Glad you could make it—it gets so boring with only these stuffed-shirt corporate types. It’s us scientists that know how to party, yeah?”

Instead of charmed, they seemed concerned. “Are you alright, sir?”

Newton was on autopilot when he laughed and replied, “Have you seen this place, pal? ‘Course I’m okay. Way better, even.”

They looked skeptical; it shocked some consciousness back into Newt. No one had doubted his facade in so, so long. Ever, really. Not even Hermann.

It shocked something into _them_ , too, a sense of urgency, and he couldn’t stop them asking, “Why—why do you ask, though?”

Their response was painfully frank; their gaze clear and honest. “Your eyes are sad.”

( _—you mean the eyes that have seen the new nuclear launch codes the eyes that haven’t seen Hermann in five years the eyes they keep fucking with so I don’t even wear contacts anymore those sad eyes—_ )

“Ha!” Newton scoffed, trying and failing to inject some levity into the sound as it rang out like a gunshot. They flinched away—Newton distantly recognized he had the power to fire them, after all, but the corporate ladder could not have mattered less to him at that moment. “Sorry, but you’re wrong. Flat-out. Couldn’t be happier right now.”

“Of course, sir,” they replied, and hurried away.

The next day, Newton went out and bought a pair of sunglasses.

* * *

Five years and three months into Newton 2.0, his body caught sight of a TV screen, broadcasting the recent death of the famous Dr. Lars Gottlieb, founder and later vocal detractor of the Jaeger Program. The name, and more importantly the memories attached, jarred Newt awake.

_(It was one of those days where the very fact of Newt breathing set Hermann off. Because of the noise, or the reminder that Newt was still alive, the jury was still out._

_Unfortunately, Newt had never been particularly sensitive—and the day before Hermann had let the maintenance workers cart off one of his experiments in progress, because it “smelled horrific” and “was rancid”—so he went out of his way to be especially grating. Blaring music, mindlessly chattering, dancing around obnoxiously with Kaiju entrails in each hand, the whole nine yards._

_And Hermann—Hermann just snapped, like the piece of chalk clenched in his hand. He’d viciously ripped into Newt, bawling at him for daring to be alive, and Newt, raring for a fight, had given as good as he got. People hurried past the windows of their lab, sneaking glances even as they booked it far, far away from the batshit scientists tearing each other to pieces._

_That was normal._

_Then Hermann started to cry._

_To his credit, he’d suppressed it admirably. Very English of him. Newt hadn’t even suspected until he saw the watery evidence winking in the corners of his eyes, the redness of his sclerae._

_Once he_ had _seen, he didn’t know what to do—which, of course, meant he immediately blurted out, “Shit, man, are you okay? No, what am I talking about, of course you’re not okay, you’re crying, okay people don’t cry—_ shit _—”_

_Hermann looked away, bringing one hand up to his face to, what, hide it? Wipe at the tears? Newt didn’t know, but he did know he had to stop Hermann crying, like, immediately, or space-time would rip and the universe would collapse._

_“Hermann, seriously—” He’d bolted over into Hermann’s half of the lab, was now buzzing around him awkwardly, hands flapping and ineffectual. “—what’s wrong, did someone, I dunno, did someone bully you for your old man clothes, because Hermann, I_ told _you those were ugly but you didn’t listen—”_

 _Wait, that was an insult, not helpful— “Fuck, I shouldn’t have—_ fuck _—”_

_He looked up at Hermann, cringing, absolutely sure he was either about to be ruthlessly murdered or sucked into the hole in space-time the paradox of a crying Gottlieb created._

_But Hermann… Hermann laughed. A short, hitching, surprised thing, like it had been shocked out of him—but a laugh._

_It surprised Newt, too; he wasn’t sure he’d_ ever _heard Hermann laugh, especially not because of something he’d done._

_“Uh…”_

_“As always, Newton, tact escapes you,” Hermann said, but it sounded almost relieved, almost grateful. Teasing. “I suppose I shouldn’t have expected you to have the emotional range to comfort a colleague in distress.”_

_“So… you admit you’re distressed,” Newt said, grasping for something—anything—that made sense. He was still stuck at ‘Hermann admitted to emotions,’ which was…_ what?

_Hermann cast his reddened eyes to the ceiling, exasperated but—fond? Was that really fondness? “Of course, Newton, we’re not all as emotionally maladroit as you are.”_

_“I think that was an insult,” Newt replied, “but I am also apparently living in a parallel universe where you have tear ducts and human emotion, so I can’t be sure.”_

_“Very funny, Newton,” Hermann said, in a way that made Newt almost think it was._

_Newt didn’t press him that day, but the next, Hermann—stiff with fake calm and rigid formality that Newt suspected was the only thing keeping him upright—came to him, explained his quote-unquote “unprofessional behavior.”_

_Newt listened, more patiently than he’d known he was capable of; afterwards, when Hermann was burning a hole in the ground with his stare, he channelled all the pent-up energy he wanted to use to punch Lars into hugging Hermann._

_Hermann didn’t even push him away.)_

What had incited the whole fiasco was: Hermann’s motherfucker of a father, his distant and domineering fuckface of a father, had called him with some paper-thin excuse that didn’t disguise the real purpose of the call, which was to shit all over Hermann’s life choices like he was four years old with aspirations of being an astronaut. Newt had decided then and there that he’d spill Kaiju blue on the guy’s clothes if he ever saw him in person. (He had not, in fact, had the chance yet, and now it seemed he never would.)

The next time Dr. Lars Gottlieb had come on the mess hall TV, Newt’d spent the entire meal shit-talking the guy under his breath. Hermann had pretended to be unaffected, but Newt had heard him snickering.

Newt didn’t know exactly how having a total piece of shit for a dad worked, but he didn’t think a whole lot of mourning came into play. Maybe some, for the father he could’ve been and occasionally seemed to be, whenever the guilt caught up to him? Whatever, Hermann couldn’t be too broken up. More importantly, _Newt_ wasn’t broken up in the slightest, and Hermann would _never_ believe that he was; nor would he believe that Newt had scrounged up enough tact to pretend for a minute that Dr. Gottlieb Sr. wasn’t a huge asshole.

Newt saw another opportunity, one damning opportunity to get Hermann to question his sanity, and, well, what else was there to do but take it?

_After all, we don’t want to be a dick, do we? Knew the guy for a million damn years, the least we could do is send our condolences, I mean, we’ve worked really hard to cultivate a very intense jerk personality but even Scrooge celebrated Christmas, or something like that, who even reads Dickens nowadays—_

**_H A T E H I M L O A T H E H I M A B H O R H I M_ **

_—that’s a little much don’t you think I mean Lord knows I hate the guy but your dad kicking it has gotta suck and you know the saying, do unto others as you’d have them do unto you, and if my dad died I’d appreciate getting a sympathy call from Hermann, or like, a hug or something, the guy avoids physical contact like the plague for God’s sake, maybe if my dad died I’d be pitiful enough that he’d give me a hug, hey that’s probably a way you could piss him off or get him to leave me alone for the rest of forever, just hug him, he’d—_ stop.

Jesus, where had he been going with all that? Thinking straight was harder than it’d ever been, and “straight” had _never_ been on the table. _Sorry, Alice, you’re great but not my type, my type is apparently bony mouthy dicks with hard-ons for elegantly written equations—_ stop.

Right, look at the screen—Lars Gottlieb, man who’d gotten a stick surgically grafted to the inside of his ass to prevent accidental slippage, had died. Maybe he shouldn’t think ill of the dead, but really, fuck that guy. _Fuck_ that guy.

(Newt caught a glimpse of his own face reflected in the screen, half-concealed behind shades, suaver than he’d ever been in his life, and thought: _Fuck that guy.)_

For whatever reason, the things in his head didn’t resist Newt’s pitiful attempts at coercion—just let him have his way for once. Maybe they saw something he didn’t; maybe they sensed that Newt was prepared to be _much_ more annoying if they didn’t cooperate. It didn’t really matter. They complied.

So Newt sent Hermann flowers and his sincerest condolences for his recent loss, may Lars Gottlieb’s soul rest in peace.

(Personally, Newt hoped the bastard would burn in hell.)

Hermann didn’t mention it, didn’t call with a demand of “why in the world would you send me your sympathies for the death of a man who you despise as much as I do,” didn’t storm into Newt’s fancy chalk-less lab with a demand of “who are you and what did you do with Newton Geiszler,” so Newt brought it up for him.

“Hey, Herm, did you get the flowers I sent? Begonias, I think? I dunno, I’m a K-biologist, not a horticulturist. Thought they were pretty, though.” He sucked in a breath. “Uh, sorry about your dad, and all that.”

“Yes, er, thank you,” Hermann replied distractedly, and Newt knew he had lost him.

He didn’t know if it was his choice or theirs, but he stopped calling Hermann after that.

* * *

In a last-ditch effort, he mentioned Alice to everyone he met. _Look at you, I’m bragging about you, you’re beautiful, baby. Let me talk about you._ Alice slipped off his tongue, to Liwen Shao, to his favorite bartender, to every poor tech that had the misfortune to work under him. Asshole-Him.

No one questioned it.

 _Jesus Christ, do I really seem that_ straight?

Maybe Asshole-Him _was_ straight. Fuck. He needed to get out of there.

* * *

Even Dr. Newton Geiszler, savior of the world and man clinically incapable of shutting up, couldn’t talk for a decade.

It was just—too much. Newt was a bona fide genius, but one human, _any_ human, against a host of primordial alien consciousnesses didn’t stand a chance in hell. So at some point, his babbling subsided, and he slid under; the way a drowning man runs out of strength to flail and slips into the sea, leaving not a trace behind. For all Newt’s efforts, the waters were calm after he went under.

The fake-ass copycats in his skull kept the new douchey shape he’d poured himself into, though. He just hoped that would be enough.

It wasn’t.

(A whole decade, and it wasn’t enough.)

* * *

But fucking _hell,_ he—they— _whoever_ was making it pretty damn obvious. Hermann approached him with _Kaiju blood-based rocket fuel_ and he said _no_? Asked specifically for his expertise _,_ acknowledged his field to be more than glorified alien butchery, and Newt said _no thanks_?

That was the largest honking clue he could’ve possibly given, decade-long separation be damned. And Hermann let him walk away.

Hermann let him walk away.

The things in his brain didn’t even say anything. Newt fell from the surface of his own consciousness like a meteor through the sky, burning up in entry.

* * *

Liwen asked about Hermann—to make sure he was no threat to their whole drone plan or whatever, Newt was hardly cognizant of it—and they replied so casually it made him want to cry. So many years worth of history, reduced to a sentence, relegated to a footnote; proof positive that Newt as he’d been was now worse than irrelevant.

“Yes, we shared a lab together.”

And a life.

“The man’s completely harmless.”

At the beginning of this, Newt would have said that Hermann posed the single greatest threat to the things in his head, simply because he knew Newt better than anyone else in the world. He knew Newt and people trusted him and he could get Newt locked up in a padded room as soon as Newt waltzed by with a suit and an apathy to scientific breakthroughs.

Now? Now he—they— _both_ spoke the truth.

* * *

Mako survived.

She was supposed to die; they _hated_ her, slayer of so many, responsible for closing the Breach.

But she was also Mako fucking Mori, so whatever she was _supposed_ to do: she survived. (Not without sustaining some serious injuries that would probably turn into wicked scars, but alive and scarred was so much better than dead… except maybe on Newt.)

Their fury was acute and wordless.

 _Oh, well,_ Newt thought, gleeful, strong enough to taunt them like he hadn’t been able to do for years, _you win some, you lose some._

**_K I L L Y O U K I L L H E R_ **

_Haven’t got the time!_ he retorted, and _oh_ , it felt good. He was giddy with it. _Killing Mako doesn’t fit in with our timeline! We can’t stray from our_ timeline _, can we?_

Their rage soon subsided as much as their rage ever did, and Newt felt good enough that he was able to ignore the fact that if all went according to plan, Mako would die regardless.

* * *

Newt saw himself—felt himself—shove Hermann off and wanted to cry from the unfairness of it all. Hermann “Personal Space” Gottlieb initiated a hug ( _a hug!_ ) in the middle of a very illegal covert operation in a blatant violation of his own strict anti-PDA codes, and Newt didn’t even get to savor it? Because apparently the version of himself that he’d set into motion with that fucking _suit_ ten years ago didn’t do _hugs from Hermann Gottlieb?_

Holy mother of Kaiju, he’d created such an _asshole_ of an evil persona _._ And an idiot of one, too, apparently.

But he barely got time to mourn this sudden and monumental loss, because the screaming shouting spitting voices in his skull were screaming shouting spitting _louder_. Enough to deafen him, enough to drive out everything but **_E N DI TE N DI TE N DI TE N DI T_**

And he was horrified but he wanted it so badly he couldn’t breathe and he had a gun in his hand but he couldn’t so much as twitch it aside and he was screaming shouting spitting _craving_ the end of it, the end of all things. He was Newt and he was Newton and he was _them_ , he was the sick blue-blooded bastards in his brain and he was howling and he was utterly inaudible.

“How do we stop this?” Hermann asked, stupid loyal Hermann, brilliant traitor Hermann, weak human Hermann, _didn’t want to end the world_ —

There was rage coursing through Newton, and he wondered when the things in his head had managed to supplant his dull red human blood with burning Kaiju blue, but he managed to obscure his blue blue blue veins and his hate and his complete utter total loss of self with a quirk of his lips and a, “There’s a back door, Hermann.”

“To what?”

“To the drone subroutine,” he said, overwhelmed and quivering with his loathing, with his hatred of these puny fucking skin sacks. Second smartest human in the world and so stupid with trust that he gift-wrapped the apocalypse for Newton. “I added a subroutine just in case I wanted to get in here and poke around down the road.”

“Oh, sneaky bastard,” Hermann breathed, the ghost of a smile on his lips, and the worst part was the _irony._ Newt thought, wryly, sadly, in control for a bare moment: _Hermann… I’m the least subtle person alive._

And then the screaming was back, the chorus of shrieking neon voices, and he was doing it.

Newt Geiszler had just one weapon in his fight against Armageddon, and it was his shrill squeaky _incessant fucking voice_ , and now he was forced speechless, save for one awful truth.

_I’m ending_

“—the world.”

* * *

Hermann looked at him like the light had gone from the world.

And Newt thought, if Hermann couldn’t tell that he wasn’t himself _now_ , when he bringing the fucking apocalypse, then there was no amount of suits or references to Alice or out-of-character behavior that could have saved him. Saved everything.

Hermann looked at him like the light had gone from the world, and Newt looked back, hopeless.

* * *

“You,” Hermann said, barely minutes later, “Precursors.”

The rush of relief Newt felt was grossly out of proportion with what the situation called for, given that the world had been slashed open and was currently bleeding electric blue into the seas, but there was light back in Hermann’s eyes, as if his faith in humanity had been rekindled.

Ridiculous. Humanity deserved to be smudged out in an all-consuming cloud of ash and fire.

Ridiculous. Newt deserved none of his damnable fucking faith.

“Very good, Hermann,” they spat, channelling all of the frustration, all of the loneliness he’d felt over ten years of Hermann leaving leaving leaving, “you figured it out. And, as usual, a step behind.”

“Newt,” Hermann said, careful but determined, so utterly sure as he was sure of nothing else but his numbers (numbers handwriting of God when he was Newt the idolater, Newton the false prophet), “you are a good man.”

He wasn’t even convinced he was a man anymore, let alone a good one.

“You must stop,” Hermann said, and oh, oh, that was RICH. He they both neither— _whoever_ , their hate boiled over, a volcanic eruption triggered by a fiddly bit of code, those three fucking _words._ “You must fight back,” Hermann said, as if he hadn’t been fighting back for a decade, as if he hadn’t been screaming at Hermann for help for as long as he had the breath to do so.

It was both him and them, inseparable, undistinguishable, when he gasped out: “There’s no point fighting them. I’m not strong enough, Hermann.”

“Please, you must—“

Second smartest person in the world and stupidest man alive.

It physically hurt to say, “I am not strong enough.” Burned like bile coming up, all vitriol and acid; burned like the blood in his veins, in his arteries in his capillaries in the ventricles of his heart.

 ** _H A T E H I M K I L L H I M_** and he _did_ and he _was_ and _NO PLEASE NO._

( ** _Y O U A R E N O T S T R O N G E N O U G H_** they roared **_H E I S N O T S T R O N G E N O U G H_** )

And the Precursors _loathed_ him, they loathed him and they loathed Hermann, and he knew it because they forced him to feel every last nerve ending on his fingers, they forced every last sense memory on him, _this is what it feels like to have your hands crushing Hermann’s throat this is what it feels like to choke the life out of him this is the Breach closing_ THIS _IS WHAT_ PAIN _FEELS LIKE—_

 ** _N O N E O F Y O U A R E S T R O N G E N O U G H_** they shrieked, and he was saying it too, and oh God oh God oh God _Hermann._

 _I’m sorry, Hermann,_ he thought, but it tumbled out as actual speech, and he hadn’t actually spoken in _so long._ A decade’s worth of fear and horror built in his throat, threatened to flood out in a torrent of apologies and pleas and self-recrimination, and all he could do, all he could choke out, was: _“They’re in my head.”_

The tears on his cheeks were scalding.

* * *

He tried to kill Hermann; Hermann survived.

He tried to end the world; the world continued onward.

He tried to get them _out of his head get them out get them out—_

Guess how that went.

His track record was… shitty. Pretty much across the board. And now he was strapped to a chair, writhing in furious agony and out of his mind. The PPDC was pissed because he’d caused the apocalypse; the Precursors were pissed because he hadn’t caused it _enough._

He knew what hell looked like—he knew it intimately, seared into his mind’s eye with that awful smoldering sun, the fire oranges and electric blues. He knew what hell looked like, and the PPDC’s impromptu interrogation room wasn’t it—but it was close.

He knew what hell looked like, and the inside of his head wasn’t it—but it was really _fucking_ close.

(But Newt Geiszler was one stubborn son of a bitch, and if a bunch of alien fucks thought they could drown him out forever, they had another thing coming.)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I swear, this ends up being a recovery fic. Admittedly, it started out as just "huh, wonder what was going on in Newt's head that long decade," but then I felt bad leaving him strapped to a chair and howling death threats. And then I wrote 18k more words than I meant to.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW more brief addiction metaphors and also a few mild references of suicidal thoughts (all passive in content, nothing actionable or graphic)

Newt Geiszler was one stubborn son of a bitch, and if a bunch of alien fucks thought they could drown him out forever… maybe they were onto something.

They, after all, were a host of interconnected extraterrestrial consciousnesses, boundless and awful. He was but a fly in their web.

It didn’t help that he had no _stimulus._ Plain chair, devoid of anything he could break off and fiddle with ( _use as a weapon—_ no). Fluorescent light strips in the ceiling, casting the room in bleak shades of yellowed gray; sometimes they flickered, interrupting the stark monotony for a split second. No visitors. White walls, blank blank blank blank blank.

No stimulus meant no distractors, meant no point of focus, meant drowning. Even if another person dropping by meant screaming his throat hoarse with threats and inhuman resonance, it would be better than this.

(Be careful what you wish for, that was the saying?)

He was expecting Pentecost. He was hoping for-slash-dreading Hermann.

Mako was a surprise.

“Hello, Newt,” she said as she entered, crisp and clean in her uniform, back straight, expression composed. If she bore marks from her near-death experience, they were concealed under the sharp navy blue fabric.

The reaction was instant; an enzyme cleaving a chemical bond, Kaiju blood in a volcano. He arched away from the chair, lurching toward her as far as his bonds would allow, frothing at the mouth and spitting obscenities.

**_M U R D E R E R D E F I L E R B U T C H E R O F A R M I E S_ **

She didn’t react to the howls; even stepped closer despite the rage boiling his blood to steam. Her face was deadly solemn, grief lingering in the corners of her eyes—but no fear.

**_F E A R U S F A L L T O U S_ **

Tears ran in acid streaks down his face, hot with churning anger, misplaced anger, invasive anger. The Breaches scattered across the Pacific had closed but the one in his mind had cracked wider, a hydrothermal vent seething in the ocean of his brain. Newt was a speck and they were a sea and she was the albatross flying above, untouchable and reviled.

But Newt’s body was weak from days without motion, on the fast track to muscular atrophy, and he could only strain so far before he had to sag back, wrecked.

(They still had hope for his use, or they’d break him like an egg, he could feel it, he knew it. They hated the taint of his mind among theirs and it was only their all-consuming hunger for worlds to devour that kept them from overloading his neural matrix. His eyes would blow red and his nose would faucet: 5, 4, 3, 2, 1, brain death.)

After he’d screamed himself hoarse, Mako tilted her head. “Are you finished?”

His mouth wouldn’t cooperate and his throat felt edged with broken glass, but he managed to twitch his shoulders in a shrug, his lips in a wry smile.

“It is strange,” she said, “to see you speechless.” Her mouth tilted up. “But not entirely unwelcome.”

_The disrespect,_ he wanted to say, _you must be taking lessons from Hermann._ I’m _the cool science uncle._

He couldn’t say it—could barely keep from yelling out _wish we’d killed you wish you’d gone down in flames_ —but the flicker of mirth in her eyes suggested she heard all the same.

The mirth had subsided, though, as she told him, “They’re deciding what to do with you. Some want to pump you for information. Most think you can’t be trusted.” She smiled a bit. “Dr. Gottlieb is demanding clearance to see you. I think he will get it.”

Her expression said, _I will make sure of it._

He hoped his said, _Thank you._ It probably said, _I want to piss on your grave_ —but even so, Mako didn’t seem unnerved.

She continued, “My brother will help you, as will I. But there are many who are never going to side with you. And no one thinks you are safe.”

“I’m not,” he croaked. Him and them, him and them.

“I know,” she replied, matter-of-fact. Mako didn’t deal in bullshit. It was one of the things Newt so respected about her (and did his best to encourage when she was a teen and prone to hanging out in the K-sci labs): she didn’t shy from the hard facts.

Still, the truth hurt. He wasn’t okay and he didn’t think he’d ever be; he didn’t even have the muscular control to flash a smile at her, however false.

Duty must have called, or whatever, because Mako left—but not before turning and saying, with as much steady certainty as she’d had before, “You’re not safe. But you will be.”

The doors glided shut, and she was gone.

**_H E W I L L N O T_** they snarled at the locked door, low and pissed. **_N O N E O F Y O U W I L L_**

Unfortunately, Newt was sort of inclined to agree.

* * *

Might’ve been weeks, might’ve been hours, but eventually the doors slid open again. Newt would’ve taken _anyone_ at that point, even Liwen—and the only reason _she’d_ visit him was to shoot him for fucking her company over. He had a feeling that the PPDC as a whole wouldn’t mind that eventuality too much.

Couldn’t blame ‘em, really.

Instead of Liwen, though, it was Hermann.

Oh, fuck, it was Hermann.

He looked… frankly, he looked like shit. Shadows dark under his eyes, fingers white around his cane, which he leaned on more heavily than he’d used to. Strain was obvious in every inch of him, in his steel-rod posture, in his pressed-thin mouth. He stopped just before Newt’s chair, out of reach but not shying away, and the doors whisked shut behind him.

“Hello, Newton,” he said.

Newt flinched, waited for the Precursors to latch on and force him to scream until he bled, but they held back. Aware and alert, like sharks circling, but not yet striking. _(Yet_. _)_

When he realized he had an opportunity to talk, the first real opportunity in a decade, Newt… couldn’t find words. Instead, his mouth worked open and closed like a fish out of water, like some dumb gaping goldfish. He got the feeling that they were laughing at him, useless voiceless human, gormless feeble flesh sack. And like, he knew, but hey.

“Hi,” he finally managed to squeak out, and his ineptitude was worth it for the relief creasing Hermann’s face. “Yeah, it’s—it’s me. For real.”

“I know,” Hermann said, smiling like he couldn’t help it. After far too short a pause, he coughed and schooled his expression. “Only you could be so ineloquent.”

“Aww, same old Herms,” Newt rasped, “Kicking a man while he’s down, with impudence.”

The sight of that familiar sour-faced scowl loosened something in Newt’s chest that had been knotted up for a long, long time. He sighed, tension releasing from his drawn-taut muscles as he relaxed back into the chair. (Relaxed in a nominal sense, given that the chair was meant to restrain an insane alien hivemind and thus not designed with comfort in mind.)

“I suppose it would have been too much to ask for a decade to have matured you in any way.”

Newt pushed away the instinctual response, some too-true too-painful remark about the effects of ten years of possession— _hello suppression, my old friend_ —and instead cracked a grin. “Not me, Hermann. I’m perpetually youthful. Just like you’re—”

He broke off, hacking. When he’d gotten control of himself, he tried to speak, but the pain in his throat spiked. Frustration spiked with it—God, he couldn’t even insult Hermann anymore without it falling to pieces, without being beaten by his own body, fuck he was pathetic—

“Just like I am perpetually a cranky grandpa who never got over the end of the Victorian era,” Hermann said, lips tipping into a smile as Newt’s head darted up in surprise. “Yes, Newton, if I can predict the timing of a Kaiju attack down to the day, I can certainly predict the end of your insult. They’re refreshingly formulaic compared to the rest of your personality.”

It was only the throbbing pain in his throat that kept Newt from laughing in pleased surprise. And even though his lips felt dry and cracked, and there was _definitely_ blood crusted on there somewhere, the Precursors weren’t going to stop him from fucking smiling. They’d taken so much, but not that.

Hermann’s smile widened in response, and then softened, faded.

“I missed you,” Hermann said. His voice was quiet and it _hurt_ to hear it, and not entirely in a good way. Which made him feel like a selfish fuck, it was just… Newt had tried, so hard. Ten years of trying had culminated in nothing but death, and maybe Hermann had missed him, but he had _needed_ Hermann. And Hermann hadn’t been there.

Defenses lowered, weary down to his marrow, “You left,” slipped out of Newt’s mouth before he could stop it, grab it, stuff it back down where ugly truths belonged. His cheeks burned— _really Newt, way to look like the pitiful piece of shit you are_ —and he looked away, staring at that really interesting blank tile on the blank tile floor.

Maybe if he willed it hard enough, Hermann would ignore it.

Who was he kidding, his willpower hadn’t been enough to accomplish anything for years.

The rap of Hermann’s cane on the floor drew nearer, and Newt braced himself, braced himself for the tirade, the _you ended the fucking world,_ the _you were so in love with the Kaiju that you got possessed by them,_ the _it was_ you _who left_ me _you dumb fucking idiot,_ and—

He felt a cool hand wrap around his.

Fuck the blank tile, he couldn’t help but stare at where Hermann had clasped Newt’s hand in his own long fingers. He looked up at Hermann, who was also watching their hands. His expression could only be described as mournful, sober and contrite. “I know,” he said, still avoiding Newt’s eyes. “I know, Newton… and there are not words for how sorry I am for it.”

He looked up, met Newt’s gaze, and Newt saw it was true. There were tears in the corner of Hermann’s eyes.

He had a split second to feel complete and utter surprise, and then it was eclipsed by sudden fear.

“Shit, Hermann,” he babbled, “Hermann, get back, they’re—” _Coming,_ he didn’t get a chance to say, because they were _there._

His body lunged forward as Hermann stumbled back, scant centimeters between them before the restraints brought him short. That hardly stopped them, pushing his muscles to the limit—and hey, at least they were curbing the inevitable atrophy—as they snapped and strained against the metal holding him. Hermann, at least, was at a safe distance, but there was no safe distance from their words, ripped from his lungs and hurled like knives.

They howled **_Y O U W I L L W A T C H Y O U R W O R L D B U R N_** and Hermann… Hermann didn’t react. Didn’t walk out, didn’t flinch away. He met Newt’s gaze steadily—and wasn’t that a trip, normally when Newt yelled at him Hermann yelled right back, a furious feedback loop. Instead, when Hermann spoke, his voice was measured, calm.

“You are stronger than them, Newt,” Hermann said, and Newt wanted to shout, _Been there done that dude, you know that’s not true, I’m weak too fucking_ ** _W E A K_** , but it came out as a snarl. “You can fight them. You can win.”

Half right. Newt _could_ fight them. Could fight them until the laws of physics were proven false, until the sun bleached his arms blank, until Hermann took up tap dancing. But he could not win.

It was like fighting the ocean, swinging punches at waves as they broke over him, pushing him down, down. Newt sputtered and spat, water in his lungs, in his brain. In drowning, there was no one to fault but nature itself, an entity too vast and unknowable to curse with your last breath. It was just the ocean, just gravity.

For Newt, it was monsters, monsters all the way down, dragging him by the ankle into the abyss.

They’d gotten especially skilled at suppressing him, smothering him. He could hardly hear what he was saying, water in his ears, and even what he did hear he could hardly make sense of. He just knew that robbed of a way to hurt Hermann physically, the Precursors were doing their level best to do it with words.

But this time, Newt was restrained. No strangling or Mega-Kaiju or armed CEOs to deal with—and so Hermann stayed.

Just stayed there, standing and watching as Newt bucked and thrashed and swore, expression carefully set into stony resolve. Long enough that Newt, distantly, knew his leg had to be killing him; long enough for the Precursors to get tired of their game and retreat.

When the tremors had subsided and silence rang through the cell, Hermann walked up and gripped his hand again. He squeezed it once, gently, before pulling away. Newt, pathetic and exhausted, couldn’t hold back a whimper.

He wanted to die of shame, but there was nothing disparaging in Hermann’s voice when he said, “I cannot stay here all night; my leg will not allow it. Nor, I think, would the officers permitting me access to you. But I will come back, Newton. I promise.”

Newt’s eyes fell shut, and he nodded. By the time the click of Hermann’s cane was too far away to be heard, he’d sunk into troubled sleep.

The next time the doors opened, in time with the floodgates in his mind, Hermann stepped through with a folding chair in hand.

He set it up, sat in it as the Precursors surged through Newt, fuming at this new imposition. His expression didn’t falter as they hurled obscenities and curses and hate, scorning everything from his leg to his softness for Newt to his humanity. He held Newt’s hand after they had fled, told him about his research in low, careful tones, even though Newt couldn’t so much as keep his eyes open.

Hermann stayed.

* * *

Despite the regular visits from Hermann—and the medical professionals that often accompanied him, to treat the whole host of fun problems plaguing Newt’s shitty body—Newt spent most of his time alone with his demons. And without an audience, the whole rage-against-captivity thing got old; instead, they turned their focus inwards.

Maybe Newt had rubbed off on the Precursors more than he’d thought; he’d always loved a show.

And what a show they put on.

Newt, from his perch atop the building and his lousy human eyes, hadn’t seen much of the devastation his three Kaiju had wrought. Oh, sure, he’d seen the Jaeger battle, he’d seen the buildings buckle in on themselves like bad soufflés—but none of that could compare with the Kaiju-eye view of up-close-and-personal death and destruction. Handy, then, that the Kaiju were a hivemind, and the Precursors had all those nasty memories shut away in storage.

They didn’t stay shut away in storage.

No, they flooded his mind as surely as the Precursors had done, vivid and gruesome, a massacre in HD. He wasn’t new to the whole sharing-memories thing—Drifting with the Kaiju hivemind and the man you’re in love with wasn’t an experience easily forgotten—but it had never approached this realness, this grotesque intensity. Less chasing the rabbit and more shooting the rabbit, skinning it, roasting it over a fire, fat crackling in the heat.

The fathomless hunger of the memories mingled with the sick guilt and grief curdling in his stomach. He might have vomited on himself, but he couldn’t tell. He wasn’t a resident in his body anymore.

**_H E R E I S W H A T Y O U D I D_** they hissed, **_L O O K A T W H A T Y O U H A V E D O N E_**

Newt looked because he had no other choice, his mind’s eye pinned wide open, and he looked because he owed it to the thousands of lives he’d ruined. Nameless faces flashed by, unfamiliar, panicked faces, each captured in a single moment of exquisite terror. They played on repeat, unending, and Newt committed them to memory as tears rolled down his aching cheeks.

The next time Hermann came and waited the Precursors out, sitting in his customary chair as he idly flipped through a book, Newt was almost too drained to come up for air at all. He wanted… wanted to sit there in silence, try and absorb some of Hermann’s careful calm through simple exposure, but. But but but. He’d spent the night awake and horrified, wracked with a sort of guilt he hadn’t thought possible, and he had to know.

When they finally left him, left him throat raw and lungs heaving, he spoke.

“Tell me their names,” he gasped out. “Hermann, I should know their names. I killed them, it was my monster, I’m responsible. I need to know their names.”

Hermann didn’t try and talk him out of it, didn’t even argue with Newt’s assignment of blame, but sorrow radiated from him like a miniature sun. “Next time,” he promised.

“Thank you,” Newt replied, struggling, succumbing, sliding back down.

* * *

Newt had already started regretting his decision _before_ Hermann walked in the door, but when the man appeared with a tablet and an expression that wouldn’t look out of place at a funeral, he skipped regret and dove straight into fear.

He really, really didn’t want to hear the true extent of what he’d done.

“Hello, Newton,” Hermann greeted, subdued. Determined.

Newt, mouth bone dry, managed, “Hey.”

Hermann’s gaze bored right through him, intense and alight with grief. He had experienced the fear firsthand, the rush of panicked desperation that came with knowing you were the only thing between seven billion people and decimation. He knew what Newt was about to find out. “Are you sure?”

Newt wasn’t. Newt nodded.

And Hermann started reading names.

They were primarily Japanese. Newt’s expertise was in biology, not anthropology, but he could tell that much. Chinese and Korean names also made a fair showing, along with various other nationalities Newt didn’t have a chance of properly identifying. None of this was surprising—it was Tokyo that had been razed, not Moscow or São Paulo—but his mind was racing, forging connections, linking patterns, memorizing. Primarily Japanese; all deceased.

Newt didn’t recognize any of them. That wasn’t any consolation.

With every name Hermann listed, Newt thought it wasn’t possible for there to be a next, wasn’t possible for so many people to have died.

With every name Hermann listed, there was another to follow it. Newt’s heart broke with each one.

There was no way for him to match them up to the faces haunting him, the ones the Precursors taunted him with, but that didn’t stop his overactive brain from trying. Was that old woman with the walker named Mei or Rin, Akari or Yui? Were the three Nakamuras all listed in a row the triplets he’d seen arguing on the street, the ones that had each tried to throw himself in front of the other two once they’d seen the Kaiju? Could he ever know? Did it even matter, when they were all gone gone _gone_ , and he was still alive?

When Hermann finally stopped, it took a minute for it to sink in. He just laid there, eyes clenched shut and tears still wet on his cheeks, waiting for Hermann to clear his throat or catch his breath or whatever and continue. It wasn’t until Hermann gently prompted, “Newt?” that it even occurred to him that the list didn’t go on for eternity.

And Newt had thought he’d known what hell looked like.

“God,” he choked out. As if the word had ruptured something in him—words and tears came rushing out, mixed together, wet and gagging. “God, oh, fuck, Hermann—I killed all those people. Fucking—there were so many, _fuck._ I can’t—shit, I _can’t_ —”

“Newton,” Hermann said softly, a futile attempt to stem the tide, “it was not your fault. It was the Precursors’.”

For once, Newt didn’t debate whether that was true or not. All he wondered was: _Did it_ matter _?_

He didn’t think so.

* * *

For the next week, after the Precursors left, Newt didn’t speak. Neither did Hermann.

It wasn’t quite a memorial, was hardly a candlelight vigil, wasn’t nearly enough. But chained up in the chair, alone with his guilt and his grief and the monsters responsible, it was all he could manage.

* * *

The second time Mako visited him, she was wearing sweatpants and a tanktop. He raised an eyebrow—it was easier to not speak nowadays, and he’d resent that they took his garrulity from him if he wasn’t so exhausted.

She read the implicit question regardless. “I’m off-duty.”

He cracked a wide, humorless smile, strained at the edges. They had been leaving him alone today, but Mako always made them agitated. There were ripples in the water. “And your idea of a day off is visiting the fucked-up Kaiju sleeper agent in your basement?”

“No,” she replied, “my idea of a day off is visiting my favorite uncle.”

The smile dropped. “Oh.” He blinked rapidly, fighting back the tears that definitely _were not_ threatening. He was just being proactive. “Uh, ah, then why aren’t you with Hermann?”

She leveled a flat look at him, and didn’t deign to reply. He might have been insulted, but he was too busy being overwhelmingly touched.

“Okay, fine,” he said, and he absolutely didn’t sound choked up, that was just the whole regularly-screaming-himself-hoarse thing. “Don’t give me that look, young lady, I am your favorite pseudo-uncle and I deserve respect.”

“Of course, Pseudo-Uncle Newt,” she said.

“Hey, I know when I’m being placated.”

“Of course, Pseudo-Uncle Newt.”

He couldn’t help laughing at that—and it felt good, really, despite the rawness of his throat. He hadn’t laughed a lot lately, and maybe that was just karma at work, but he’d always been a selfish bastard. He’d take what he could get. “Do the starry-eyed masses know what a smartass you are?”

She smiled serenely. “I could have you court-martialed for slander, Dr. Geiszler.”

“I think you’re gonna have to get in line for that one,” he said, and Mako snorted. “Yeah, yeah, laugh it up. See if I’m sympathetic when _you_ get possessed by an evil alien hivemind.”

“If _I_ were the one possessed,” Mako said, and God bless her, she didn’t even seem phased by Newt’s shitty-humor-in-the-face-of-severe-trauma coping strategy, “you would not need to be sympathetic, because I would have succeeded in ending the world. Easily.”

He gaped at her, and then grinned. “I resent the implication that I wasn’t a good choice of hidden evil mastermind. I’m, like, the quintessential mad scientist!” And yeah, sure, he’d been kinda going “rich asshole capitalist” instead of “morally defunct mad scientist” these past few years, but he was the mad scientist trope at heart.

Instead of arguing the precise nuances of Newt’s supervillain identity, Mako just shook her head, chuckling softly. “You are ridiculous.”

He huffed. “Yeah, maybe.”

Mako’s quiet laughter subsided, and they both relaxed into the comfortable silence following in its wake. It was tinged, as always, with the knowledge that this couldn’t last forever—that the Precursors could come at any moment, without warning—but Newt forced himself to ignore that. The willful ignorance strategy had about as much long-term effectiveness as the whole coping-with-humor thing, but there was something to be said for short-term effectiveness, too. Short-term effectiveness was what got him through the day.

His face started to itch. He had a theory that the itching was the Precursors’ fault, just one more minor irritation to really push him off the deep end. It was working, because though the whole sore throat, bleeding nose, raw wrists schtick sucked, the itch was _maddening._

“Hey, uh, don’t judge me or anything,” Newt said, already wincing away as if he could escape his body if he just tried hard enough, “but, uh. My nose really itches? And I can’t, uh. Actually scratch it like this. It’s been driving me crazy, uh. Would you mind—?” As if the whole situation wasn’t embarrassing enough, his voice scaled up like ten octaves on the last sentence.

Mako, to her credit, was managing to keep a straight face. It was pretty obviously a struggle, though, and he couldn’t blame her. He’d laugh himself if it wasn’t utterly humiliating.

“Of course, Newt,” she said, walking up to him. “I can see—”

It was rapid, vicious, and total; they eclipsed his mind and seized his body. He jerked forward, precise, brutal—his head smashed against Mako’s with a sickening thunk, and she flew backwards.

Mako laid limp on the floor, unmoving, and the Precursors snarled their satisfaction before leaving as swiftly as they came.

The pain in his skull didn’t even register, nor did the door swishing open, nor the guards storming in—only a constant stream of _no no no no Mako please no no not again not_ again _please no_ that he may or may not have screamed aloud, feral with desperation. He hadn’t seen the helicopter crash, hadn’t been haunted by the visual; here, the image of her prone body sprawled underneath the bleak fluorescent lights of his cage was inescapable.

There were guns trained on him. There should have been guns trained on him 24/7, there should have been guns trained on him the minute he walked out of his apartment ten years ago in a suit and a contract with Shao.

The Precursors wouldn’t care if they got him shot, not now. He wasn’t sure if he’d care that much, either.

But before the PPDC goons could take decisive action—or Newt could give himself an aneurysm from the guilt and the fear—Mako sat up, held up a hand. “Stop.”

The guards stuttered to a halt, clearly warring with their desire to club Newt over the head and their instinctive loyalty to Secretary-General Mori, former Pilot of Lady Danger and savior of the freakin’ universe. Fortunately for Newt, the latter won out, and they lowered their weapons.

“Are you sure, ma’am?”

“Newt is not a danger to me,” she said firmly, and he just barely bit back a hysterical laugh. Mad scientist cackling would _not_ help his case—if he even had one. “You may leave now.”

“Yes, ma’am,” the lead guard replied, and they all filed out like ducks in a row.

When they were gone, Newt told her dully, “You should have let them stay.” _Let them shoot me._

He was almost positive he hadn’t let the last part slip out, but Mako seemed to recognize it in him anyway. Or something like it, at any rate, some sense of the subtext, of the regret soaking Newt’s brain through. “It is not your fault. It is _not._ ”

She was serious, so serious, made serious by an alien war, made serious by her kindness.

And it _shattered_ him.

He had come inches from wiping that kindness from the planet. Scant millimeters. Her helicopter had gone down and it was Newt who’d been responsible.

When she was young, she’d used to play in their lab, always on Hermann’s side because Newt’s was all lethal acid and lax adherence to safety regulations—but on those days where she dropped by, there’d been a silent olive branch extended between them. Newt would shuck off his blue-stained gloves and apron and cross over into enemy territory; even when he’d annexed a section of Hermann’s blackboard to doodle on with her, Hermann had merely sighed and moved aside to give them more room.

_(“You’re a softie for kids!” Newt exclaimed after Hermann had presented Mako with a package of rainbow-colored chalk, delighted with this new ammunition. “I knew it! You couldn’t be a hard-ass about_ everything _to_ everyone!”

_“If I was, quote, ‘a softie for kids’,” Hermann retorted, “I wouldn’t protest your presence so much.”_

_“Don’t listen to your Uncle Hermann,” Newt said, ruffling Mako’s hair. She scrunched her nose and shook her head at him, which he cheerfully ignored. “He’s just jealous that_ I’m _the cool uncle.”_

_“Do not call me that, I am not her biological relation, and neither are you for that matter—”)_

God, she’d been so small. Small and—and—not frail, because she’d never been a shrinking violet, but… _human._ So horribly human. If he’d improperly neutralized any Kaiju blue, not stopped her wandering into his lab space—he could’ve killed her. Easily, accidentally.

Could’ve killed her.

( _—end her break her destroy her—_ )

Could still kill her.

He was crying, he realized, and didn’t remember when he’d started. They were fire against his numb cheeks; he was distanced from his body in a way he wasn’t sure if he could blame on the Precursors. “I’m sorry,” he gasped out, had been gasping, kept saying. “I’m so fucking sorry, Mako, I’m sorry, I nearly killed you, I’m sorry, I’m sorry—”

And she was gone in an explosion, bleeding out under shitty fluorescent lights. Mako was dead twice over and it was _all HIS FAULT—_

A hand grabbed his, pressed it against a patch of warmth. Skin. He looked down; she was kneeling, so that his hand could reach her shoulder. The skin under his hand was raised, ropey—he could see a thick scar radiating out past his palm like a starburst. He stared at it.

“I am alive,” she said, and even if she’d been a hallucination, a ghost, a side effect of his mind tearing itself to shreds—he would have believed her. “I am alive, Uncle Newt. Don’t worry.”

She smiled at him, hand clasped over his on her scar tissue, wide and reassuring. It hurt how badly he loved her, in that moment, proof of her life livid beneath his fingers. He would’ve done anything for her, anything as long as she just _kept being alive,_ kept herself separate from the scenes in his nightmares.

He would’ve done anything for her, so he listened to her.

“Okay,” he said, repeated, “okay. You’re alive, got it. I, uh, haven’t totally cracked yet, I can differentiate between a hallucination and the real thing.”

“That is not how hallucinations work,” she said, a smile twitching at the corner of her mouth.

Shockingly, he felt his own mouth mirror hers, of its own accord. A natural smile. Imagine that. “Yeah, it is,” he argued. “I’m the one with the neuroscience degree, I get to say how hallucinations work.”

“Using your expertise to sell lies,” Mako said sadly, shaking her head. “So shameful, Dr. Geiszler.”

“Hey, that’s _Dr. Geisz—_ oh, oh wait,” he said, and started laughing. “Shit, you already—shit.” She started laughing, too, falling back to lean on her hands, letting her head tip toward the ceiling. “Wait, I can—I can recover this, shut up—”

“Six PhDs,” Mako said, giggling, “and so clueless.”

“Yeah, well, they don’t offer a doctoral program in human interaction at MIT,” Newt said. “Or maybe they do now, fuck if I know.”

“Perhaps you should enroll.”

“Only if Hermann does,” he said, and snorted. “Can you imagine that? Hermann taking classes on how to mingle at parties? On how to talk to people without sounding like a particularly tight-assed robot?”

Mako smiled impishly. “No more than I can imagine you taking a class on how to express your feelings without resorting to petty insults. Or on how to flirt without lots of yelling.”

Okay, he probably deserved that one, but _yowch._ You didn’t know pain until you’d been called out by the no-longer-a-kid that you had watched grow up into a blue-haired badass.

Newt winced, would’ve rubbed the back of his neck if he’d had the mobility. “I’m that obvious, huh?” Or maybe, _was_ that obvious. Past tense. There wasn’t any lost love between the Precursors and Hermann Gottlieb. Possessed Newton hadn’t exactly been playing guitar outside Hermann’s metaphorical balcony.

Mako nodded. “If it’s any consolation,” she replied, “he is, too.”

Now that was a can of worms Newt absolutely was not psychologically capable of opening at the moment, so he skillfully changed the subject. “How’s your brother doing?”

She gave him a look that said, _You’re full of shit but I love you so I’ll go with it,_ which was at least a refreshing change of pace from the look he usually got, which was just _You’re full of shit._ And she started talking about her brother, young Pentecost Jr., which turned into talking about some guy called Lambert, which turned into talking about a J-tech named Reyes, which turned into talking about Liwen Shao, who was apparently now _dating_ the J-tech, which, what the fuck.

“You get all the good gossip, huh?” Newt asked, impressed. When he’d been a regular fixture at a Shatterdome, the only reason he’d gotten his grubby little hands on any hot news was because he was tight with Tendo—and he hadn’t even been an officer. (Of course, maybe even officers were more approachable than the Kaiju-cozy K-science freak.)

Mako’s eyes twinkled. “I’m sure I don’t know what you’re talking about. But if I did, you could blame it on my loudmouth brother.”

She stood up, rubbing at her temple, and Newt was abruptly torn from the fantasy where he was part of the PPDC soap opera in any capacity. The sudden influx of guilt must have shown on his face, because she patted his hand.

“I’m okay,” she said as she left, “and you will be, too.”

And this time? This time, it almost sounded true.

* * *

That night they showed him her helicopter spiraling down, the hot bloom of flame as it crashed, to remind him that it wasn’t.

* * *

“We have a theory,” Hermann said, carefully, “a way to weaken their control over you.”

Newt trusted Hermann, he really did. He was the most brilliant man he’d ever met, and if anyone could find a way to evict the Precursors from his mind, it would be him.

Trouble was, Newt didn’t think it _was_ possible. Not really. Not after a decade.

“That’s great, Herm,” he said, tired. Tired tired tired. There was a special type of exhaustion that came from knowing that any moment, your will and your mind and your body could be stolen from you. At least before, there’d been a constancy to it. Here, Newt had no autonomy for them to exploit; they waxed, waned, fucked him over at the worst possible moments. “Really great. Hope it works.”

“You… don’t think it will,” Hermann said.

No point in lying. “No.”

Hermann pressed his lips together, but normally where he would’ve been angry for Newt doubting one of his precious theories, now he just looked sad. Newt hated it, hated it. “I cannot tell you the specifics,” Hermann said, sounding as if each word was a measured, precise choice, “in case the Precursors formulate a defense. However, the science surrounding it is sound. I know you doubt your eventual freedom, Newton, but I do not.”

“Right, because your precious fucking numbers tell you so,” Newt muttered. “Pardon me if I call bull—”

“No,” Hermann interrupted, the careful intensity in his voice causing Newt to stop, look up. “It is because I believe in _you._ ”

A fuse blew in Newt’s brain, and it felt like a decade’s worth of bitterness sparking out and dying. “Uh.”

Hermann smiled, a little bit. Newt’s brain was in danger of a total system overload, cascade failure. “And you are far too stubborn and irritating for even an alien hivemind to outlast you.”

Seizing onto the one thing that still made sense, Newt replied, “You’re one to talk, you—you stubborn and irritating hypocrite.” Somehow, it sounded like an endearment. Fuck.

“You must always have the last word,” Hermann said, almost tenderly. It wasn’t even the first time he’d said that, but God, it _felt_ like the first, the only time that mattered. “And that is how I know you will win, Newt.”

With Hermann standing there, eyes all liquid warmth and voice barely-leashed affection, telling him that he was stronger than an alien army, Newt had to struggle very very hard against his baser instincts, which were mostly to blurt something like _I’m painfully in love with you_ at the top of his lungs.

Instead, he squeaked, “Uh. Thanks. I think?”

It was probably a good thing his arms were restrained by his sides, or he’d be slapping himself.

Still, he couldn’t have said anything too stupid, because Hermann was still smiling at him like he’d done something mildly amusing if predictably slow, which Newt couldn’t even resent, because again: smiling, with affection. C’mon, Hermann, play fair.

“Of course, Newton,” Hermann said, warm as sunlight, and that was _not playing fair at all._

As if the words had summoned them ( _oh do you want not playing fair we’ll give it to you we’ll show you the marrow of it_ ), Newt felt activity stir in the Breach of his mind. They coursed into his head like an oil spill, unfurling, curling around his neurons and seizing control. Before he could blink, his mouth was moving, splitting into a mad grin.

“Aww,” they drawled, “how _adorable_. Are you gonna kiss him better, Herms? He wants you to, you know. It’s pathetic. I mean, humanity is in general—no hard feelings, pal—but your little boyfriend is especially so. A whole decade, just ‘Hermann help me, Hermann save me, Hermann Hermann _Hermann_.’” They snarled the last word, betrayed their rage before plastering that shark’s smile back on his face.

“But you never showed up! Imagine that! Bet you feel guilty now! Because, Dr. Gottlieb: **_you came far, far too late.”_**

Hermann’s expression shuttered, going hard and cold and determined; Newt just felt sick. _They_ felt gleeful.

“We enact our plan tonight,” Hermann told him, them, and then all he knew was screaming.

* * *

Hermann may have had some bullshit belief in him, but _he_ believed in _Hermann._

And the Precursors were afraid of him.

Panting, blood dribbling down his chin, exhausted from their tirade howled through his lips, Newt could feel it. Mako, Becket, Pentecost, that kid Namani—they’d all proven that humanity could stand up to Kaiju, the puppets. If Hermann could pull this off, if _Newt_ could pull this off—they’d prove humanity could stand up to the puppet _masters_.

Stand up and _win_.

He cracked a grin, savage, crimson, wild. _Yeah,_ he thought, _you_ better _fear him. He’s the stubbornest, smartest son-of-a-bitch I’ve ever met, and he’ll burn you fuckers to the ground._

So maybe Newt wasn’t quite so hopeless after all.

* * *

It started, appropriately, with a whisper.

A susurrus through his thoughts, a ripple in the deceptively still waters of his mind. That’s how it had started all those years ago, too—a frisson of want running through him, a bare sliver of temptation. Drift with the brain. Drift with the brain, they had whispered, and it had sounded like his own voice.

But they didn’t whisper anymore—they shrieked and squealed and rumbled like the earth quaking apart, they bellowed their rage as a volcano belched lava. Gods spoke with thunder in their words, and Newt was far, far too weak to drown out their voices with his own. Too weak and too quiet. (A first, for him, loudest smartest shrillest in any room.)

It started with a whisper.

They’d wrung him out after Hermann left, leaving crimson clotted in his nose, bleeding circles around his wrists where the cuffs had bit in. They always retreated back to the Breach after—he suspected they were _too_ connected to his body, _too_ aware of the nerves flashing pain up and down him. Why stick around in the broken vessel, why suffer its pinprick agony as their own? They did a far more efficient job torturing him than the PPDC ever would have.

(Apparently the Anteverse didn’t recognize the Geneva Conventions.)

His mind was quiet in their wake, a quiet he’d grown to resent as much as the roiling noise of their presence. If his mind was quiet, his body was screaming; if his mind was in chaos, the complaints of his body muted. Sometimes he got lucky and it was _both_ —mind, body, probably even the soul he didn’t believe existed—all lit aflame by pain and anger and gnawing hunger. But for now, his mind was quiet. Eye of the storm.

It started with a whisper, and built to a low rumble. Enough to stir the waters, send the Precursors swirling back into his brain, coldly curious. He wasn’t responsible for the rumbling—was in fact as wary as the Precursors were, Hermann’s promise of a plan momentarily forgotten—but he could be sure they’d punish him for it. Whatever this new upset was—it would be his fault, in the end.

( _—like all those deaths like the end of the world—_ )

At the bottom of his mindscape, where the grooves of his brain deepened and stretched into something alien and awful, the facsimile of a Breach shuddered. It had been wedged open when he’d first Drifted with Alice, a portal maintained through her presence; time and exposure widened it, let more and more of his jailers through as if his mind was a microcosm of the post K-day Earth.

Maybe it was, maybe it was. Because now, the sulfurous simmering Breach in his head was—

Closing.

His eyes shot open. _Holy shit._ That was as good a thought as any, and the only one he could produce, as the Hell fuming in his head began to shift closed: _holy shit holy shit holy shit holyshitholyshitholyshit—_

For once—for once!— _they_ were slower on the uptake than he was, for once—for once!—on the defensive and utterly unfamiliar with the sensation. He could feel their confusion, reveled in it for the split second before Newt’s understanding became theirs, and—

The world exploded.

Normally, someone at explosion Ground Zero would be obliterated instantly. No pain would register because the nerves supposed to carry that signal had gotten vaporized, as did the brain they were supposed to be carrying it to. Instant cremation. Anyone else was at risk from the blast wave, the debris, the impact, the fire—primary, secondary, tertiary, quaternary blast injuries, often deadly and always painful. But for those lucky bastards at Ground Zero: no pain, no thoughts. Just death.

Newt, because the universe hated him, didn’t get to die.

He was trapped in the nanosecond of obliteration, his entire nervous system flaming as the world burned, burned. It was all writhing white-hot agony, and behind that, a feeling that Newt was losing some precious, something irreplaceable.

Newt had tried out the whole rockstar thing years and years ago, and though he’d never done drugs himself, he’d watched others plunge down the slippery slope of addiction. He’d valued his faculties too much for it, liked the rockstar lifestyle for the glamor and the fame but not so much for the inevitable descent into a drugged-up stupor.

Funny how life worked—he’d avoided drug addiction then, avoided cocaine and heroin and fucking Kaiju bone powder, and then he’d gone and gotten himself hooked on Drifting with a Kaiju brain fragment. Because this… this felt like detox must have, if all the pain of it was condensed down into raw nanoseconds of drilling, chattering _need._

He hated, hated that stupid fucking piece of brain, he hated Alice more than words could convey, but that didn’t change the fact that _they_ had wired his head to her. A gateway drug to a whole _world_ of fucked-up, she was necessary, woven into the dendrites of his neurons. And now she was being ripped away, or so it felt.

Newt’s head was cleaving open. He’d let it, he’d let it, if that meant this _ended._

Of course, because the universe hated him, it didn’t.

But the pressure _did_ abate, the difference between being at the sea floor and rising thousands of feet upward, and maybe he’d get the bends but at least words made sense now, at least his thoughts were more than splotches of neon pain.

He cast his senses out, searching downwards, and found _them_.

For once— _for once_ —he liked what he saw.

The Breach was closing, and they were being sucked in. The seas of his brain churned around him, blue-veined shadows fighting for traction that didn’t exist. The Breach burned in the distance, hot and hungry, and it _hurt_ but what a goddamn sweet pain.

Newt flipped them the bird as they were torn past, screamed at their retreating backs _AND DON’T LET THE DOOR HIT YOU ON THE WAY OUT,_ met their desperate fury with one of equal magnitude. He wanted them gone gone _gone_ , no matter the pain, no matter the cost.

If his brain boiled from the inside, it would be worth it to take them down with him.

And for a moment—minute—hour, it almost seemed as if that was the only possible outcome: his gray matter melted to slag, the Precursors robbed of their last link to Earth at the cost of his life. They gripped their claws into the fissures of his brain, ripping chunks out as they skidded backwards, toward the Breach. For once, a force stronger than them was at work, but that force wasn’t Newt.

(A memory flickered, _we enact our plan tonight_ , and _Hermann Hermann Hermann—_ )

Then the last shadow slipped through, and the Breach wrenched itself shut, two halves welding together.

**_N O_ **

they howled, one last roar of primal rage, and they were gone.

Gone.

_Yes,_ Newt thought, one last whisper of broken relief, and he went too.

* * *

Somewhere deep in the bowels of the PPDC, a lump of bile-green flesh was being incinerated as a dour physicist watched, something like vicious satisfaction in his gaze.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The (bullshit) science in this fic is absolutely not the focus so I gloss over it an obscene amount, but suffice it to say, destroying Alice was the linchpin in getting the Precursors out of Newt's head. I basically treated her like a conduit, like a Breach in Newt's mind. As long as she exists, the Breach remains open, with the Precursors able to freely enter and exit; incinerating her closes it, forcing the Precursors back to their own bodies lest they be trapped in Newt's head forever. Since the link between Newt and the Precursors was formed via Drift, there's still the Ghost Drift to account for, sort of non-sentient imprints of the Precursors left behind, which will eventually fade as time goes on. (But because of the incredible length of time that Newt spent with them in his head, the Ghost Drift lasts much, much longer than it usually does with rangers.)


	3. Chapter 3

When Newt woke up, he immediately wished he hadn’t.

Some sadist was driving an icepick into his skull, which he was pretty sure violated some PPDC guideline on proper treatment of prisoners, but he couldn’t even muster up the words for a formal complaint, because his head was _going to explode._ Just, just spontaneously combust into a bunch of filmy gunky shards, brain matter splattering all over the white white walls of his cell.

He distantly recognized a noise, a high keening sound that may or may not have been issuing from his own lips. Then he recognized another, a gentle shushing that definitely _wasn’t._

His eyes cracked open; the lights were low, which was good, because if they were any brighter they would have killed him. As it was, the added pain was manageable—in the sense that if Atlas had to carry an extra pebble or two, he’d still be getting crushed by the weight of the world.

What had he been thinking about? Right, the shushing sound of indeterminate source. He blinked into the dim light, waiting for his eyes to adjust. Or to stop—blurring everything together, or whatever the fuck was going on with his vision. Nothing was resolving like it should, even considering the headache, and he began to panic, blinking, breathing rapidly.

Shit, something was being slipped on his face, he tried to flinch away but there was nowhere to go he was trapped and he—

Could see again. Oh. Glasses. The headache abated somewhat.

There was a man standing in front of him. Oh. Hermann.

He was watching Newt carefully, expression guarded. Good old Hermann—never leaping to conclusions before all the facts presented themselves. No matter how often his theories were proven correct, he never let it influence his work on the next one. That was how they worked: Newt was reckless, brilliant confidence, and Hermann was relentless, steady surety.

God, he’d missed him. Holy shit, he’d missed him.

But right now, they were just staring at each other; Hermann didn’t know, didn’t know his idea had worked, didn’t know for sure they were gone. Normally Newt hated admitting Hermann had been right about anything but now he could—could sing it to the skies, if he could just fucking _find the words—_

For all his looking, he could only find the one. But it was fitting, he thought, that the only word he could manage was the one he’d been babbling on loop for a decade, as instinctive and necessary as breathing. Fitting if inconvenient.

“Hermann,” he croaked, voice cracking over the syllables, weak and wrecked and _wanting_. _“Hermann.”_

And maybe that was proof enough, because suddenly Hermann was standing as close to him as he could get, murmuring “Newton” like it was the meaning of life.

His hand reached up, curled around Newt’s cheek, warm and grounding, achingly gentle. He pressed into it; couldn’t help but do so. The Precursors weren’t in control but he hardly was either, driven by something intrinsic—seeking true north. And that had only ever been one person.

Hermann’s expression cracked into the most naked display of affection Newt had ever seen on another face. “I have _missed_ you, Newton,” he said again, and in this tide of sheer relief, after weeks and weeks of Hermann proving it, it wasn’t grating—simply true.

“I missed you too,” Newt replied. “God, dude, I missed you so much. Like, so much, you can’t even know, it was like—like fucking breathing, or something, missing you, I just—” He was rambling, knew he was rambling, couldn’t stop. He blamed the sudden emptiness in his brain, the sudden unsettling emptiness he had to throw words at until it filled up again. The sudden unsettling emptiness that was _exactly how it was supposed to be,_ because they were _gone._

Hermann had to know.

“They’re gone,” he interrupted his own babbling with, abruptly desperate; it was absolutely imperative that Hermann believed him. He couldn’t spend another day in this chair, in this cell, in these chains. “Hermann, they’re gone, I swear. I promise, this is one-hundred-percent bona fide Newt Geiszler talking, it’s not a trick—”

Hermann turned away, and for a heart-stopping moment Newt thought he was going to leave, leave again, leave Newt more alone than he’d been in a decade. But instead, he shouted, “You heard the man; come release him!” at the two soldiers Newt hadn’t noticed, loitering by the door.

He sank back into the chair, relief flooding through him; he wasn’t being abandoned.

“Can’t you see he’s no longer a danger?” Hermann snapped as the guards lingered uneasily. “I have given the Precursors ample opportunity to render me unconscious like they did General Mori, but they haven’t, because they are gone. Who you have in captivity here is a victim of this whole dreadful affair—not to mention one of the men integral to the success of closing the Breach ten years ago—and I would very much appreciate if you allowed me to free him and take him home, where he belongs.”

“Forward of you,” Newt mumbled, and Hermann shot him a glare. His cheeks were pink.

Newt grinned, and kept grinning as Hermann turned his glare on the cowed soldiers. He continued scowling at them as they shuffled over to Newt’s chair, keying in the release code on the back, and he scowled at them until they left the room, the door sliding shut behind them.

Hermann Gottlieb, frumpy professor and intimidator of heavily armed soldiers. Newt adored him.

“You shouldn’t have chased those guys away,” Newt said, still smiling. “I’m not gonna be able to walk, not after so long chained up like this, and you can’t carry me.”

“Ah,” Hermann said. He looked utterly flabbergasted by this surprise turn of events. “Right.”

Newt snorted, couldn’t help it. “Maybe you should call them back?”

“Right,” Hermann said again, and startled into action. He marched to the door, stride military precise as always—the rhythm of his cane against the floor as regular and familiar as Newt’s heartbeat—and began talking to one of the guards.

Newt just watched from his perch in the chair, headache pulsing lowly at the base of his skull. He massaged his sore wrists, rolled his ankles. Having a free range of movement was a new one. (A few weeks or ten years coming, depending on how you defined it.)

He briefly floated the idea of getting out of the chair himself, capitalizing on this sudden freedom, but by that time Hermann had wrangled some PPDC goon into helping carry the crazy Kaiju mouthpiece—or whatever the base gossip was painting him as—and he was being helped out of the chair, a person on each side. It became quickly apparent that Hermann’s arrival had been timely, because Newt’s legs gave out from under him the minute he pressed his full weight into them. Hermann and the soldier kept him upright, if just barely, and Newt managed to regain his footing, so to speak.

Wow, walking unassisted, reveling in his newfound independence, not gonna happen. Another glorious dream up in smoke.

Instead, Newt leaned most of his weight on the guard, limping along on legs weak as water as Hermann gripped his other arm. It must have been late, since their strange shambling procession—a guard with muscles the size of small grapefruits, the most highly esteemed Breach physicist in the world, and the scrawny asshole that almost caused the apocalypse, linked together and moving at a snail’s pace—didn’t garner any attention. The few people who walked past them were far too bleary-eyed to give a shit; Newt found himself unaccountably grateful.

He found himself way less grateful when they veered into the white-walled, disinfectant-stinking medical bay.

“Shit, medical?” Newt asked when he realized that they were not, in fact, headed back to Hermann’s room so he could sleep for a week. A woman in scrubs directed them toward an empty bed, and his two escorts helped him into it even as he bitched. “Really, Hermann?”

“Really, Newton?” Hermann responded, a mocking lilt to his tone. “Did you truly think that after being strapped to a chair for five weeks and exhaustively battling an invasive alien consciousness, rendered so weak that you cannot stand upright, you would be going anywhere _but_ medical?”

Newt winced. “Kinda?”

“You are going to be the death of me, Newton Geiszler,” Hermann huffed. “That is, if you don’t manage to kill yourself first.”

“How can I, man, with you watching over me all the time?” Newt meant it to be sullen. It came out honest, almost grateful. (If his voice kept doing that without his say-so, he was gonna have a bigger problem than when it was taking orders from genocidal extraterrestrials.)

They both lapsed into silence, only broken by the hum and beep of medical instruments in the background. The guard had long disappeared; a nurse soon took her place, checking Newt’s vitals, plugging needles all down his arm like it was free real estate, setting up a drip. He murmured something to Hermann, who whispered something back, shaking his head. The nurse nodded and left, and by that time, the good drugs had hit Newt’s bloodstream and he was floating away from himself, from his sore body and aching head.

He might have panicked about the sudden loss of self, post-possession trauma manifesting in an irrational fear he was going to escape and destroy the world again, but Hermann was there. Hermann wouldn’t let him do anything stupid, or at least, he’d do it with him.

Newt’s head fell to the side, and he stared up at the other man muzzily. Hermann, just sitting there, watching him with the intense focus normally reserved for his numbers, for his Breach model in another lifetime. “Aren’t you gonna leave?” He felt like that made sense to ask, through the haze—Hermann had a place here, a bed to sleep in, a vital and respected role in the machine of the Corps. It was the middle of the night and Newt sure as fuck wasn’t going anywhere, so why wouldn’t Hermann leave?

“You idiotic man, of course not,” Hermann said.

And that was that.

* * *

After about a week of being monitored by every doctor the PPDC could dredge up and twice as many psychoanalysts, Newt had been medically cleared to escape the sterile stench of sickbay. He was not, however, cleared to leave the base grounds, which was how he found himself shoveling down spaghetti in the PPDC mess hall at three in the morning, sitting across from Hermann as the man nursed a cup of tea.

Newt was awake because the idea of sleeping repulsed him, nervous energy that had been stoppered for ten years finding release in the form of relentless insomnia ( _and you’re afraid of the nightmares, jackass_ —but he didn’t have to acknowledge that aloud). Hermann was awake because Newt was.

“They want to keep you under observation a while longer, to make sure that you truly are yourself again,” Hermann was explaining, “but they agreed that it was in everyone’s best interests for you to spend that time out of your cell, for the sake of your recovery process. I, obviously, volunteered my space.”

Newt raised his eyebrows. “ _Everyone’s_ best interests?”

Hermann sipped his tea primly. “It is in the world’s best interests for the PPDC’s foremost scientist to remain in their employ, rather than languish in some obscure German university.” He met Newt’s raised eyebrows with a matching expression over the rim of his teacup. “Wouldn’t you say?”

“Shit, Hermann!” Newt exclaimed, delighted. “You blackmailed the fucking Marshall?”

“Keep your voice down,” Hermann hissed, as if it were high noon with half the base bustling around them instead of three hours past midnight. Then the corner of his mouth twitched up, and his eyes gleamed. “But yes, I think that is the technical term.

“ _Not_ ,” he said, going suddenly stern, “that I would have actually acted on my implied threat. My work here is much too important to abandon. Especially considering Ranger Pentecost’s nascent plans to eradicate the Precursors, should they ever come to fruition.”

“Okay,” Newt said, grinning, “so you successfully _bluffed_ the Marshall of the whole fucking PPDC. Into letting me stay with you. That’s badass, dude!” He slapped Hermann on the shoulder, which Hermann weathered with the same long-suffering fortitude he’d relied on for ten straight years, back in their Shatterdome days. A passing J-tech glanced his way, and then took a deep gulp of their coffee as they wandered by.

Despite it being ass o’clock in the morning, a surprising number of red-eyed recruits could be found shuffling through the mess, usually with death grips around steaming mugs. A few would nod to Hermann as they passed, mumble out, “Dr. Gottlieb,” because apparently, despite his connection to Newt, he was some sorta big-shot here. Newt couldn’t help but mourn what they could’ve had—a life where _Newt_ was a fixture here, a fixture in Hermann’s lab and life, a fellow big-shot savior of the Earth. He knew if he’d been involved, he could’ve made the Kaiju-blood fuel at least 5% more efficient.

But, hey, he was here now, unchained, unoccupied, eating shitty military pasta as Hermann faked a scowl.

“Your reaction to dubiously legal activities performed on your behalf fills me with confidence for your rehabilitation into society.”

“Aww, shut up, you love m—it,” Newt replied. Nice save, him. To distract from his near slip and the conversation he definitely wasn’t ready to have, he cleverly segued into another conversation he wasn’t ready to have. “You, uh, you put some serious work into all this. Thanks.”

Hermann set his teacup down, brows drawing together. “There’s no need to thank me, Newton. I would’ve done far more than this to bring you back to yourself.”

“Right, yeah, of course you would’ve,” Newt said, backpedaling frantically. Shit, they were getting _genuine_ genuine, he was in no way prepared for this. “Duh, I’m Newton Geiszler, who _wouldn’t_ do anything to get all this back.” He gestured down at himself with his fork; it was a weak effort even considering that he’d been possessed by malevolent alien conquerers until recently. “I’m hot shit, man, and don’t you forget it.”

“Never,” said Hermann. It was dry, ironic, and searingly honest.

Newt didn’t know what to do in the face of that surety. He shoved more spaghetti in his mouth.

* * *

Back in the Hong Kong Shatterdome during Newt’s glory days of living in constant fear of global annihilation, he and Hermann had been something of local legends. Not because they were, y’know, literal geniuses and the foremost K-science experts in the world, but because, well. They yelled a lot.

So much so that the corridor to their laboratory was almost always deserted, and almost always echoing with their vitriol. Just him and Hermann, left to their own devices, and left to their own devices he and Hermann _fought._ That was just how they communicated, prideful fucked-up emotionally-constipated jerks that they were. It worked, sort of. Better than anything else did.

It figured, then, that the first substantial conversation they had after burning the Kaiju hivemind out of Newt’s brain was less conversation, more full-scale screaming cage match.

Newt supposed they _were_ ten years overdue.

He hardly knew how it had started—he’d made some stupid joke about fucking off and becoming an angsty punk rocker, now that all he had going for him was a tragic past and a reedy, scratchy voice (still not entirely healed from his time as a Precursor spokesperson). It had been one-hundred-percent goof, not least because Newt wasn’t sure if the PPDC was ever letting him leave the premises, but Hermann had gone all stiff and still like he’d over-starched his stupid grandpa clothing. And Newt, chronically unable to heed the writing on the wall, kept poking at him, teased, “What, scared I’ll leave you behind to chase my emo punk destiny? Don’t worry, Herms, I’ll still call you when I’m topping the charts.”

“Oh, so eager to relive your glory years?” Hermann spat back, muscles wound so tight he looked like he might snap apart, zero elasticity in any part of him. His cane was less brittle than the fingers crabbed around it. “Running off to chase fame and fortune and your beloved fucking Kaiju?”

Wait wait wait _wait._

“I’m sorry, I must be going crazy,” Newt said, slowly, “because it sounded like you just implied I _enjoyed_ being a vessel for an alien hivemind, or maybe even _wanted_ to be one.”

Hermann didn’t say anything, just tipped his chin up, imperious, infuriating.

Newt was abruptly and incandescently angry. “What the _fuck_ , dude? What the _actual, literal fuck_? How can you even say that? I thought you were sorry about what happened—I thought you felt guilty! What fucking happened to ‘I’m sorry for leaving you’?” and, God, the question burned on the way out, like bile, like Kaiju blue.

Maybe he hadn’t gotten over everything that had happened vis-à-vis Hermann giving up on him after all.

“I seem to recall that _you_ left _me,_ Newton,” Hermann snapped. “ _Not_ the other way around.”

Maybe Hermann hadn’t, either.

“Oh, _I’m_ sorry,” Newt said, because _fuck you fuck you I thought you said you understood,_ “but _I_ seem to recall being _fucking possessed_. Believe it or not, I didn’t exactly have control over my actions then.”

“Be that as it may, from _my_ perspective it seemed as if you were purposefully distancing yourself from me. What was I supposed to do, continue to intrude, tactless and willfully ignorant of your clear wishes? I am not _you_ , Newton.”

Ignoring that last dig, practically incoherent with outraged disbelief, Newt exclaimed, “Uh, _yeah,_ that’s what you were supposed to do!” His arms spasmed in time with his words, gesturing wildly, ferociously. “Jesus fuck, Hermann, that was your whole goddamn job! You were supposed to chase after me!”

Hermann’s face ruddied. “Like—like some sort of jilted lover? You made it very clear that since you were properly a _rockstar_ ”—he spat the word like something foul—“you had no use for me. I wasn’t about to force my company where it was unwanted.”

Newt wanted to howl. The most intelligent person Newt knew and so obtuse it was a wonder he could talk and walk at the same time. “That was the whole point! That was the whole point, it was supposed to tip you off! I just—agh, _Hermann_.

“I made it so fucking obvious, dude! I stopped wearing glasses! I started wearing suits! I went off to join fucking Liwen Shao, and you _know_ how I feel about huge arms corporations! For fuck’s sake, Hermann, I just up and _left_ you, as if you hadn’t been my only constant for thirteen fucking years! What about that is normal Newt behavior?” He gritted his teeth, looked away. “Shit, Hermann, I’d thought you were the only person who really knew me. I’d thought you were going to figure it out.” He huffed a laugh. “My staff got closer than you ever did, and they’d never even known me pre-possession.”

Hermann looked like Newt had turned into a Kaiju in front of him, all wide-eyed surprise and horror. “I… Newton, I never… I didn’t realize.”

“Yeah,” Newt scoffed, bitter, tired. It had been so long. “No shit.”

Split-second calculations sparked in Hermann’s eyes, equations spooling through his brain and out his ears, obvious in the way he stared, stared, swallowed. Spoke.

“You must understand, Newt,” Hermann said, low and hesitant, “I am not… accustomed, you might say, to close interpersonal relationships.”

“Got that right,” Newt grumbled. Hermann scowled at him, and he raised his hands in appeasement. “Yeesh, sorry, go on.”

He drew in a deep breath, seeming to compose himself, and continued: “Everyone I have ever grown close to has invariably left. You were an outlier I could not account for, but when you called and told me that you had left for Shao Industries, I thought I had finally figured out where you belonged: with the rest of the data points.”

And though Newt had made up his mind to be irreconcilably, righteously angry with Hermann, the image of him staring at his perfect best fit line of people leaving, outliers safely back within the acceptable margin of error, made him too sad to sustain his fury. Too sad and too regretful; another hurt he’d caused through his recklessness, one of the first in a long, long series.

“Of course you were not at fault,” Hermann continued, timed as if he could read Newt’s mind, words firm as if he knew Newt’s doubts, “but at the time, I believed you wanted to be rid of me, wanted to be rid of everything I represented, and I couldn’t bear to impose where I wasn’t wanted. I had too much pride for that. So, in one of the greatest regrets of my life… I allowed you to pull away.” His expression was pinched and imploring. “Can you forgive me, Newton, for not trusting you as I should’ve, as you more than earned?”

“Yeah, yeah, of course”—he knew he was being flippant, more flippant than was fair to either of them, but Hermann had just admitted to a life’s worth of rejection and everything in Newt screamed to address that first, to assure him that it ended _now_ —“but, uh… you know better now, right?”

He stepped closer, put a hand on Hermann’s shoulder. “Like, you know I’d never do that? I’d never leave you of my own volition. You gotta trust that, buddy, or this”—he flapped his free hand between them—“is never gonna work. Whatever it is.”

“You are being startlingly imprecise,” Hermann replied, the normally crisp tones of his speech softened and wavering at the edges.

“‘Startlingly’?” Newt grinned. “Imprecise rambling’s my whole brand, dude.” He paused, and then asked, more seriously, “But do you believe me now? That I’m not going anywhere?”

Hermann paused; when he nodded, it was firm, unswerving. “Yes,” he answered, with the same certainty he predicted Kaiju appearances with, the same passion he burned with defending the PPDC and its mission. Newt felt like he was caught in Otachi’s gaze again, faced with something massive and unknowable and scorched into his core. “I _trust_ you, Newt.”

The breath left Newt in a whoosh; he hadn’t even realized he was holding it in. “Great,” he stammered, “that’s uh, great. I, uh…” _am too monumentally fucked up to commit to trusting anyone, even, especially you._ He trailed off, cringing, neck burning, embarrassed by this sudden inability to speak four simple fucking words. _I trust you too_ sounded unreachable, impossible, because he looked at Hermann sometimes and thought: when was he going to leave again?

But then he met Hermann’s gaze, steady and resolute like he was again donning the makeshift PONS helmet to save the world at Newt’s side, and new memories filled in the empty pockmarks of the old ones: Hermann knocking Liwen’s gun aside despite the bruises already purpling on his throat; Hermann in that shitty plastic folding chair, flipping through a book as the Precursors howled bloody murder at him; Hermann staggering with him to the medical bay; Hermann cupping his face, holding his hand, being close, being _there_ ; Hermann staying.

“It is okay if you cannot trust me, yet,” Hermann was saying, while Newt stared at him. “I hurt you, severely. But—if you’ll have me—I plan on spending the rest of my life trying to earn your trust back. And—and I know there is nothing I can do to make up for my error, but I—”

“No, actually,” Newt interrupted, and he was shocked to realize he meant it, shocked and painfully relieved, “I think you have.”

Yes, Hermann had missed ten years worth of clues, a decade-long S.O.S. But he had also saved Newt’s life even after Newt had tried to crush his windpipe—and that was the _least_ he had done to rescue Newt from himself. He’d saved his body, saved his mind. And he had sat by his bedside, like they were fifteen years younger and Newt had damn near hospitalized himself with improperly neutralized Kaiju blue.

Hermann was staring at him like he was out of his skull, and Newt was on the edge of a major discovery, and _fuck_ it felt good to be back. Familiar territory, at last.

Excited, brain fizzing like he had cracked some genetic code, like he had made the final crucial connection in a suddenly-viable theory, he said, “We both fucked up, yeah? I shouldn’t have Drifted with the brain again, and you should have pushed the issue of me leaving like that. But, when it came down to it, when you understood what was going on… you stayed, Hermann. I needed you to stay, and you did.” Grinning, he exclaimed, “Fuck, you burned an alien hivemind out of my head. You blackmailed the PPDC marshall for me! If that doesn’t show you care, what does?”

His previous anger had dissipated in the wake of this revelation, this new fascinating hypothesis that given a choice, Hermann would stay. And because Newt was a scientist first and a normal person second, he couldn’t help but test it.

This conversation was long overdue, anyway.

Newt’s smile gentled, and he took Hermann’s free hand in his. “And, like, don’t tell anyone, dude, but the whole ‘sitting by my side day and night even as the aliens possessing me screamed death threats at you’ is the most romantic shit anyone’s ever done for me.” He paused, and then added, “Well, aside from this one guy who wrote me a bunch of fascinating, passionate letters back when I was twenty-something—”

“Twenty-four,” Hermann said. His eyes were warm, crinkling at the edges.

“—twenty-four, yeah. He might have you beat on the romance front, sorry.”

“I’ll just have to pick up the pace, shall I?” Hermann replied, lowly. His gaze flickered down to Newt’s mouth, back up to his eyes, the question clear. ( _Hypothesis fucking confirmed_ , Newt thought, giddy and awed. This was better than proving the Kaiju were clones.)

He leaned in toward Hermann like a sunflower tilts toward the sun, just a basic fact of biology, and answered hoarsely, “Yeah, I guess so.”

Hermann kissed him.

Gently, experimentally—trust Hermann to approach even this with his usual methodical precision—and with all the tenderness of two decades behind it. Newt melted into it, hand sliding up from Hermann’s shoulder to cradle the back of his neck… and for a few perfect moments, he was ten years younger, sharing his mind with the only presence he’d ever wanted there.

When they broke away softly, breath huffing warm in the short space between them, Newt could catalogue the differences. Hermann’s haircut was different, his face more lined, more open; Newt’s own body ached more, still sore and weak from the Precursors’ treatment and weeks spent locked up.

It wasn’t ten years ago. He wasn’t that same Newt Geiszler, one whose trauma was limited to a chronic nosebleed and the occasional night terror—and the man in his arms wasn’t the same Hermann Gottlieb. Nothing could ever erase the last decade, the mistakes made, the hearts broken, the lives lost. To pretend otherwise was an impossibility.

But hey—that didn’t devalue what they had _now._ Sure, they were both more battered, both nursing more scars and fracture lines—but when had Newt ever chosen the easy way, anyway? Not when he’d taken on six doctorates, not when he’d committed himself to a field that everyone else in the world scorned, not when he’d looked at Hermann Gottlieb profiled against his chalkboards and thought, _I’m going to spend the rest of my life with that man_. Why should this—whatever _this_ ended up being defined as, startlingly imprecise as it was—be any different?

Newt and Hermann had spent their first decade together shouting and sniping and falling in love; had spent their second alone and aching; and now were facing their third. Standing there in a half-embrace, lips still tingling with the sense memory of Hermann’s, Newt thought it had the potential to be their best yet.

You know. If they didn’t kill each other, first.

* * *

Newt spent most of his time at the base keeping his head down. His clearance was pretty much limited to the mess hall and Hermann’s room, so he could almost always be found at one location or the other, or shuttling between them. People didn’t talk to him, but neither did they mess with him, and he figured that was the most he could ask for; and anyway, he had Hermann.

Hermann, who stayed practically attached to his hip, which Newt would tease him about if he didn’t feel the same way: like the man was going to disappear forever if he let him out of his sight for too long.

On one of the rare days where Hermann was unavoidably detained by some super-secret science meeting—one of those meetings that if Newt tried to enter, he’d get his head shot off—Newt took his daily commute to the mess, and ran into Mako Mori.

She was in her uniform, no doubt on her way to do some important generaling shit, some vital and immediate work to better humanity, and yet when he mentioned he was going to get something to eat, she didn’t hesitate before offering to join him. When he tried to wave her off, she made it clear it was not actually an offer.

They didn’t talk on the way. It might have felt awkward, but Newt was too busy drowning in the questions he needed to ask and didn’t want the answers for.

By the time they got there, Newt was no longer hungry, so he just grabbed a coffee and sat down at a corner table, as secluded as it got in an open, sparse room like the mess. Mako didn’t get anything, but then, it was obvious that the mess hall hadn’t been on her agenda until five minutes ago.

They sat across from each other, Newt bouncing his leg and gulping down his shitty coffee and about to vibrate out of his skin or vomit, Mako a calm, composed, unruffled foil to his nervous wreck. As if she could read his roiling, rambling mind, she stayed quiet.

He managed to stop himself from blurting anything humiliating by utilizing his coffee as a gag, but once it was gone, there were no more barriers between his mouth and the world at large—certainly not his better sense—and he burst out with the question that had been haunting him ever since she set his hand against her gnarled shoulder.

“You don’t resent me,” Newt asked, “for the scars?”

Mako didn’t answer right away, giving the question the gravity it deserved. Which Newt appreciated, definitely, but he was about to crawl out of his skin with anxiety if she didn’t say something soo—

“No.” She shook her head. “No, I don’t. It was not you, Newt.”

“I mean,” he said, some strange garbled laughter curling along the words. “It… it kinda was. It was me in everything but intent, really, and sometimes I couldn’t even tell us apart in that.”

Not that he’d ever been conflicted when it came to Mako. Their hatred was overwhelming, vast as space, sucking the oxygen from his collapsing lungs—but it was always, _always_ theirs. He couldn’t hate the sharp little girl swinging her legs as she sat on Hermann’s work table, watching Newt work with bright eyes.

She paused again, and he braced himself for it, the rejection, the disgust. She said, “They are like your tattoos,” and he winced away, God she hated him, fucking hated him, and worse he _deserved—_

Wait, _what?_

He must have said it aloud, or else his face said it more succinctly than words ever could, because she smiled. “My scars are like your tattoos,” she repeated, gesturing to his arms, to what they both knew hid under his rolled-down sleeves.

The suits still felt wrong, his old shirts and jeans a blessing, but he couldn’t bear to show his arms like he’d used to. It was abhorrent, anathema. Unthinkable.

For the first time, he understood what people thought, looking at the ink on his arms—Kaiju groupie, Kaiju apologist, Kaiju fucker. He’d kept his sleeves rolled up in spite of it, sometimes specifically to spite them; they didn’t know him, couldn’t fathom what the Kaiju represented to him, the enormity of it. The Kaiju were… they were proof of life elsewhere, they were proof that Newt could spend his whole life looking and never run out of things to find. They took his childhood spent watching _Jurassic Park_ and _Godzilla_ and his adulthood spent earning biology degrees and distilled it down into one passion, one glorious new field of science that _he_ got to spearhead.

Now? Now his tattoos filled him with the shame that had been wished on him all those years ago. Another thing the Precursors had ruined.

“No,” Newt said, shaking his head. “No, your scars are because of me, ‘cause I fucked up, wasn’t strong enough. My tats are… were my choice. And a fucking dumb one.” He gave a wet chuckle.

“My scars are because of _them_ ,” she insisted. “And your tattoos used to make you happy. Just because they hurt now doesn’t erase that past.”

Before he could reply, she smiled conspiratorially, like she was fourteen again and trying to sneak Hermann’s glasses off his face after he’d fallen asleep at his computer while Newt egged her on. “I’d wanted to get a tattoo because of you, you know. But of the Jaegers, rather than the Kaiju. I was not so crazy as you.”

Despite himself, he’s curious. Distraction, successful; point to Mako. “Why didn’t you?”

Her grin turned a little wry, a little knowing. “My father was a great man, and he would’ve done anything for me. Anything,” she said, “but allow me to get a tattoo.” She shrugged. “And after I came of age, I was far too busy.”

He huffed, groused, “The old man was right again. I sure as shit _do_ regret them.”

She tilted her head. “But only because of the Precursors?”

“Well, yeah,” he replied. “Of course. They sorta stole any enjoyment I might’ve gotten from ‘em. Kinda hard to appreciate a constant reminder of that time you fucked up and got possessed for ten years, no matter how well done.”

Mako nodded, a decisive dip of her head. “And that is why they are your scars,” she said. “They show that you survived.”

Newt opened his mouth, but nothing came out. He got the sense that he’d been had. Mako must have gotten the sense, too, because she grinned, said her goodbyes, and left.

He stared after her, blinking. He looked down at his arms, hidden under his sleeves, and suddenly the ink poking out from beneath the white didn’t seem so damning, so deplorable. He wasn’t about to go pull on a tanktop, but… he felt better. Noticeably so.

Damn her. Even his figurative monsters were no match for Mako Mori.

* * *

The day his hearing rolled around, the officials in charge looked as skeptical as he felt. Not nearly as anxious, though.

He still wasn’t okay; probably would never be okay, by his old measure of the word. He’d undergone ten years of intense psychological trauma, and that didn’t get erased in a night. He’d ended the world, for all intents and purposes, and that didn’t go away either.

The Precursors were gone, but the Ghost Drift ensured that their imprint lingered. Sometimes Newt woke up next to Hermann and remembered the sensation of his fingers wrapped around that long throat and wanted to vomit; worse was when he remembered it and wanted to feel it again, alien, invasive hatred curling around his spinal cord.

He sometimes did vomit; he never strangled Hermann, even when it was his own, perfectly human impulse. The remnants from the Ghost Drift weren’t sentient, more like intrusive thoughts: surfacing at the worst times, stomach-churningly despicable, but ultimately nothing he was about to act on. Nothing that made him a threat.

The PPDC officers looked like they couldn’t give less of a shit about Newt’s intrusive Kaiju problem. Seated in a loose semicircle around him, made forbidding by their sharp dark suits and identical stony expressions, they looked down at Newt from their raised dais like he was a particularly annoying bug. Not even a cool one, like a Hercules beetle, or a resourceful one, like a honey bee—no, he was a cockroach, a mosquito to them. Something to be squashed rather than captured in a jar and studied. (And _released_ , that was the important bit: _released._ )

Staring up at all of those hostile faces ringing him, Newt felt very, very nervous about his potential squashing.

But Hermann had already fought the good fight, so this hearing wasn’t about whether or not he qualified as an accessory to attempted genocide—which really _would_ get him squashed if he were found guilty, stamped out like the vermin he was—but whether or not the Precursors were _truly_ gone and he was _truly_ safe to let wander free. The million-dollar question, if his life and freedom could be said to be worth a million dollars.

Given the nebulous nature of Drift science, and the handful of other unknowns thrown into the mix because Newt’s Drift partner had been Kaiju, not Homo sapiens, it was an altogether difficult question to tackle. Newt had _felt_ them go, watched them, but understandably, his testimony wasn’t worth very much right now.

But again, Hermann had been working overtime, fueled by—spite? determination? coffee? love?—and had amassed an exhaustive array of brain scans and other fancy bits and bytes of data, all turned toward the singular end of proving Newt sane.

You know. For a relative meaning of the word.

“Dr. Geiszler,” intoned the officer leading the hearing, a heavily-decorated Hispanic man with a monobrow to match his monotone. Newt didn’t recognize him, but then, he hardly recognized anyone in the PPDC nowadays.

The general—or colonel or sergeant or whatever, who even knew how ranks worked—was apparently waiting for an answer. Newt straightened, said, “Yes, sir?” in as inoffensive a voice as he could manage.

Apparently it was inoffensive enough, because no one tackled him to the ground and arrested him for insubordination. Instead, the general continued, “We have reviewed the materials submitted to us by Dr. Gottlieb, including his professional recommendation concerning your mental state.” Newt wondered absently if this guy was capable of emoting, or if he went through life conversing like a toneless robot. Hermann could take lessons from him. “While we recognize his personal bias in favor of you, his statements have been corroborated by numerous other impartial medical and psychological professionals.” And the guy had _no_ flair for the dramatic, because with hardly a pause, he concluded, “You no longer pose a significant threat to the safety of the world.”

That was a little insulting, but Newt knew better than to dispute it. He wasn’t _that_ stupid.

(He’d complain to Hermann later.)

“It’s, uh, good to hear you say that, sir.”

“But,” the guy said, and jeez he must be fun at parties, “should you experience any concerning aftereffects, we will expect you to report them to a PPDC official at once.”

Right, because if Newt suddenly found himself possessed again, the first thing the Precursors were going to do was register their presence at the nearest military base. Was there a trans-planetary customs? Did they have to declare any foreign fruits or animals they were bringing over from the Anteverse, or just foreign consciousnesses?

The room was quiet, expectant, and it occurred to Newt that he was supposed to say something—preferably something reassuring all the nice military officers that he was just regular ol’ Newt, not an alien sleeper agent. “Of course, sir. I don’t want the world to end any more than you do, trust me.” He couldn’t stop a burble of nervous laughter, which, yikes, embarrassing.

The general stared at him flatly, and then said, “Right. I hereby declare you sound of mind, and release you from PPDC custody. You’re a free man now, Dr. Geiszler.”

Newt couldn’t get out of there fast enough.

* * *

“He called me a non-significant threat,” Newt whined into Hermann’s shoulder. They were curled up together in their ( _their!_ ) bed, Hermann in his stupid grandpa pajamas, Newt shirtless. After years and years of crashing on laboratory couches, Newt finally began to see the appeal of an actual mattress with actual sheets. “I could bring the Earth to its knees if I wanted to. I _don’t_ want to, but I could.”

Hermann sighed and kept rubbing his bare back. “I know, darling.”

“I’m a fucking force of nature.”

Hermann pressed a kiss to his forehead, a hint of a smile in his voice as he echoed, “I know, darling.”

* * *

The first thing Newton Geiszler did as a free man was resign from Shao Industries.

Actually, resign was a nice word to describe what happened. What really happened was this:

Newt walked in the front door of Shao Industries HQ, demanding to speak with Liwen Shao.

Two scary, muscular men materialized on either side of him and kicked him to the curb, so he marched back in and tried again. They “escorted” him back to the sidewalk. He went back in; he went back out.

The cycle repeated until the receptionist told him that Liwen Shao was liaising at the PPDC base currently, and Newt escorted himself out. Out and back to the base, where Liwen Shao and actual traitor _Hermann Gottlieb_ were hunched over some diagram of some physics bullshit, conversing in hushed tones.

“Hermann! You dirty fucking backstabber!” Newt shouted as he charged up to them. “I just spent the last hour getting kicked out of _her_ building and you’re—you’re here _sciencing_ with her?” It occurred to him that he sounded like a jealous girlfriend, but he figured spending his morning getting repeatedly thrown out of a building entitled him to a little irrationality.

Hermann looked heavenward. “I _told_ you I was meeting with Dr. Shao this afternoon, Newton.”

“Oh yeah, when?”

“When you told me you were going to go officially resign from Shao Industries, and I replied that I was meeting with Dr. Shao later, but you had already started ranting about your hatred of corporate institutions and thus _completely_ ignored me.” Hermann McTraitor turned to Liwen. “I apologize for my partner, Dr. Shao, he skipped kindergarten and thus never learned manners like the rest of us.”

Liwen smirked—smirked! Newt didn’t know her mouth was physically capable of smiling!—and inclined her head at him. “Oh, I’m quite accustomed to it, Dr. Gottlieb. But not, I don’t think, for much longer.” She turned to Newt. The smirk was gone. “You’re fired.”

“Oh, no, no, no, no,” Newt exclaimed. “I’m not fired, I quit. I demand agency in this decision.”

“Request denied,” she said. “You’re too late, anyway. I terminated your employment the first moment I had free after the Mega-Kaiju was killed.”

Newt blinked. “Damn, okay.” She worked _fast_ , apparently. Still. “Well, uh, I—I never got to say when I was, y’know, possessed, but I’m very skeptical of your business model. Huge arms corporations are already hella shady, but adding _drone J-tech_ to the mix? No matter how rah-rah-save-the-world you are—and you’re not—that’s just _asking_ to be exploited by the military. Your goal is to cover the world with your fancy walking missile launchers? That’s, that’s like, major-league fucked. So, yeah. I think your company is ethically defunct and also painfully plutocratic.”

Hermann looked like he wanted to die, but first take Newt with him. That was fairly standard for Hermann, so Newt ignored it.

“I didn’t think it possible,” Liwen said, slowly, “but you are _more_ intolerable now.”

He spread his arms out: presenting, Newt. “That’s the Geiszler brand, dude.”

She sighed in that way Hermann did, like it was physically paining her to interact with a moron such as he. “If you must know, Dr. Geiszler, I plan to use my drones solely for reconstruction efforts around the world. They are to be completely deweaponized. I am here to discuss with Dr. Gottlieb the best course of action.”

“Oh,” he said, righteous tirade faltering, “good. That’s, uh, good, I’m glad.”

“I’m thrilled to have your approval,” she said dryly. “Now, get out. I never want to see you again.”

“The feeling is mutual!” he shouted over his shoulder as he was half-escorted, half-chased out by Liwen’s bodyguards. It was only after he was standing stranded outside on the tarmac that it occurred to him that they’d chased him off of his own damn base. Or if not his, his partner’s. A base more his than Liwen’s.

He dropped his head to his chest and laughed. Right. Okay. That had gone great, employment terminated, just what he’d been gunning for. All it had taken was making an ass of himself in front of a genius multi-millionaire who also happened to be his former employer.

He shrugged. It happened.

The _second_ thing Newton Geiszler did as a free man was take every scrap of money he’d earned in the last ten years and donate it to the Tokyo Restoration Project. He sold his stocks, he sold his swanky apartment, he sold all the insanely high-dollar shit in it, he sold his slick car, he sold the _suits._ He put it all toward the Tokyo fund. Helping to rebuild the city and financially compensate the families impacted was the _least_ he could do.

Both quitting and donating all of his ill-gotten gains were the right calls, but it left him jobless and broke. Neither fun places to be, especially when you were kind of public enemy #1. The PPDC had played it all close to the chest, so Newt wasn’t getting murder threats in the mail, but his reputation had definitely taken a nosedive—academia didn’t want him because he’d gone into the private sector; the private sector didn’t want him because he’d gotten booted out by Liwen. Being hated from all sides was a difficult thing to achieve, but Newt had always been one to reach for the stars.

But it was fine. He’d had e-fucking-nough of fame.

(He had decided that he hated being stared at, which sucked, because previously he’d loved being the center of attention, stealing the spotlight with his batshit-but-brilliant theories. Now whenever eyes caught on him, it felt like they were watching Tokyo burn. Angry, afraid, confused—whatever their expression, he saw the broken teeth of the city skyline in their eyes.)

Of course, there was a wide margin between rockstar-famous and unemployed, and Newt was rather closer to the latter than he’d like to be. Three days into him clawing at the walls of Hermann’s tiny quarters, obsessively checking his email for job offers he’d never get, Mako Mori marched in with an exasperated smile and an open research position.

Apparently Newt’s none-too-subtle boredom had also been driving _Hermann_ up the wall, so much so that he’d gone to beg Mako for a handful of Kaiju organs and an empty storeroom, something, _anything_ to stem the relentless tide of Newt’s frustration. According to Mako, he’d been two seconds from opening the Breach back up just to give Newt a source of distraction and fresh carcasses—or maybe just to shove him through.

She’d responded by assigning Newt to Hermann’s one-man laboratory. He still wasn’t sure if it was meant to be a gift or a punishment. (He’d asked after one particularly explosive argument, and she had just smiled enigmatically and walked away.)

Their newly shared lab was cramped and isolated, one shitty lumpy couch crammed in the corner, a sink and coffee maker the only things gracing the single countertop. Despite the technological advances Hermann had been at the forefront of, all of the tech and holographic models looked K-era, a decade old—nothing like the sleek sharp newness Newt had come to expect at Shao. Somehow the room already reeked of formaldehyde, as if someone had doused the floors to make him feel more at home. Half the room was covered in chalkboards.

Newt loved it. Loved it even more when the long-preserved scraps of Mega-Kaiju came pouring in, loved it more than words could say when Hermann reflexively pulled on thick rubber gloves and began the dissection, oblivious to Newt’s open-mouthed stare until he’d made the first incision and Newt squeaked his surprise.

(Loved the lab most of all when they broke its shitty couch in afterwards, because the sight of Hermann elbow-deep in Kaiju guts, keen as his scalpel and unflinching, did funny things to Newt’s insides.)

Newt might have been out of the K-sci game for a decade, but he was still unrivaled in his field. He tore into his new samples with gleeful abandon, imagined each scalpel shoved into a liver was a knife in the eye of the Precursors, gathered more and more knowledge for the rangers’ use. And all through that massive influx of organs, there were no Kaiju brains to be seen.

Things weren’t paradise. Even ignoring the whole crowded-military-base-preparing-for-war thing, Newt still felt the repercussions of 10 years of possession—more often than he’d either like or admit to. Nightmares were a given; intrusive thoughts were a painful, panic-inducing reality; guilt was a constant presence, a phantom lingering over his shoulder, wearing the faces and names of a thousand different people. Sometimes he couldn’t bear to sleep in the same bed as Hermann, convinced he would wake up with his hands wrapped around his cold, stiff neck; sometimes he had to go hunt down Mako and just _look_ at her, writing over the sight of her helicopter going up in flames. Sometimes he would thoughtlessly slip on shades instead of glasses, and through the blurry, dark lenses, it would seem like he was never going to be okay again.

But at the end of the day, Newt slept safe in the arms of the man he loved, and his mind was his own.

One of those nights, worn from 24 straight hours spent tirelessly in the lab, pleased with the work he’d managed to get done examining the Kaiju circulatory system, he turned to Hermann. “Hey,” he said gently, and Hermann’s eyes flickered open, falling on him with undisguised affection.

God, Newt would never get tired of that sight. Maybe that was why he said it—or maybe he said it because after all they’d been through, after all they’d said to each other, been to each other, it seemed silly to not.

After everything, “You know I love you, right?” fell from his lips as easy as Hermann’s name. A yet unused instinct, stretching a muscle he’d always had but never exercised.

Hermann smiled, carded a hand through Newt’s hair. “Mm,” he hummed. “Yes, I know.”

There was a pause, and then Newt asked, “Anything else you want to share with the class?”

“No, I don’t believe so,” Hermann replied.

Newt let out a low squawk, batting Hermann’s hand away. The other man’s expression professed itself impassive, but the twitching of his lips upward exposed him. He thought the whole thing was funny, the bastard. “Well, now I take it back,” Newt said, fighting down a smile himself. “I’ve never loved you.”

Hermann hmmed again, leaned over and pressed a kiss to Newt’s forehead. He whispered against Newt’s skin, “I don’t believe you.”

Newt laughed softly into the space between them, closed it, pressed his body flush against Hermann’s. “Good call,” Newt murmured, kissing him, “I’m notoriously full of shit.”

“Yes, you are,” Hermann agreed.

Newt pulled away a little, looked up through his eyelashes at him. Batted them, because he was ridiculous, and Hermann was being infuriatingly tight-lipped about this fact that they both knew. “But you love me for it?”

Hermann just followed him, capturing his lips, kissing him deep and sweet. A wordless declaration, and that was all well and good and Newt was assuredly not complaining—rather, reciprocating eagerly—but he was kinda after the _verbal_ sort of declaration. He ended the kiss; Hermann made a little noise of complaint, nosing after him, and Newt very nearly abandoned knowledge of his own name, forget _I love you._

But, no, he couldn’t let Hermann win like this, he’d be insufferable. More insufferable.

“You have to say it back,” Newt insisted, despite Hermann’s continued attempts at diverting him. “That’s like, the rule.”

Hermann nipped at his jawline. “Of what?”

“Of, of dating.” Newt was pretty much just spinning bullshit by then, Hermann’s plan to distract him proving effective. Damn the man.

Hermann pulled back, quirked an eyebrow in a way that Newt wasn’t afraid to admit was unfairly attractive. “You are a ridiculous, ridiculous man.”

“You got me,” Newt agreed. And, because he was stubborn and ridiculous and Hermann’s until the day he died, he asked, “A ridiculous, ridiculous man that you love?”

Instead of rolling his eyes or smiling or kissing him again, Hermann curled a hand around Newt’s cheek, the smooth of his jaw. His expression was serious, piercingly intense; Newt couldn’t help the shiver that shuddered through him at the low rumble of his voice.

“Newton,” Hermann said, as if Newt’s very name was an endearment, that single extra syllable holding boundless affection, “I am unconscionably, irrevocably in love with you. I have been for years and I will be for many years more, and I know this as surely as I know that you are firmly aware of the extent of my feelings, and yet persist in this charade because you enjoy the sound of your own voice far too much.”

“Wrong,” Newt rasped, mouth dry and _I am in love with you_ ringing in his ears, the sweetest tinnitus, and Hermann is so smart but he is _wrong_ —“I enjoy the sound of _yours_.”

He lunged forward; Hermann met him halfway, and they lost themselves in each other.

(Maybe being a little out of his mind wasn’t so bad.)

* * *

When Newt woke up the morning after, he stayed there in bed, warm and content and tucked against Hermann—a decision made, completely and utterly, of his own free will. Just because he wanted to.

When he got dressed, he put on a pair of skinny jeans and a soft AC/DC t-shirt, and a pair of bulky black glasses.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Aaand that's a wrap! Thanks for reading, and if you feel like it, let me know what you thought! Every comment is like a shot of serotonin right to my brain.
> 
> (Also, a few scenes throughout this fic were inspired by either scenes/one-off lines in some other uprising fix-it fics I read: [Shanghaied](https://archiveofourown.org/works/18844171) by Avelera, [Conversations](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14075943) by batyalewbel, and [Incompatibility](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14075292) by Rikku. If you haven't read any of them, I would definitely recommend checking them out!)


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